The Wachowskis know how to produce a spectacle. In that, they may very well be the cinematic heirs of Cecil B. DeMille, whose films featured showmanship of the highest caliber, but some of whose films could charitably be described as insubstantial. And such is the case with the space saga, JUPITER ASCENDING, a film chock-a-block… Read More »
Going Beyond BLACK OR WHITE
Mike Binder has a particular genius for showing people brimming with good intentions, but flawed, stumbling through life without the operating instructions that would help them negotiate the bumps along the way. He has the gift of showing humor and pathos as elements that are not so much disparate, as entwined, manifesting at oddest moments… Read More »
Julianne Moore is STILL ALICE
It starts with a slip so small, so subtle, that it goes unremarked by everyone present. At the birthday celebration for Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), her rejoinder to a question about the sibling rivalry between her two daughters concerns her relationship with her own sister, now deceased. It is a moment that evokes what is… Read More »
A MOST VIOLENT YEAR Is A Most Excellent Film
A MOST VIOLENT YEAR begins, appropriately enough, with its protagonist, Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) running. Though this is merely jogging through the snowy landscape of 1981 New York, he will spend the rest of the film running more purposefully either literally, figuratively, or both, as he scrambles to overcome fate and the fickleness of human… Read More »
EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS and Missing the Mark
Lovely to look at with some fine performances in a muddled execution.
THE HOMESMAN
Tommy Lee Jones is a dour man, at least on screen. His carefully cultivated persona is a laconic one of few words and little patience. It is a character that he plays to perfection, and in THE HOMESMAN,he imbues it with a wonderful, understated quirkiness that makes his star quality all the more charismatic. As… Read More »
THE BETTER ANGELS
No plaster saint, nor marble effigy of Abraham Lincoln is to be found in THE BETTER ANGELS. Based on the recollections of Lincoln’s surviving family, as spoken by his cousin about his boyhood in Indiana, this is a Lincoln before the legends had taken root, the Lincoln of great promise whose intellectual curiosity and love… Read More »
JOHN WICK
JOHN WICK is a sleek and unrepentant film about revenge and redemption. Set in a parallel world to ours, one populated by criminals who live by a strict set of rules, conventions, and etiquette, it is a dark fantasy of violence in which the hero isn’t the pacifist, it’s the guy who really loves his… Read More »
GIRL CUT IN TWO, A (La Fille Coupee en Deux)
It’s a very long way to go for a punch line, but Claude Chabrol fearlessly meanders along for the two hours it takes him to get there with A WOMAN CUT IN TWO, based loosely and badly on the infamous early 20th century Thaw-White murder scandal at whose center was Evelyn Nesbitt, the so-called Girl… Read More »
FROZEN RIVER
Two women driving in the snow in the dead of a winter night slip from the shoreline onto the broad, imposing expanse of a frozen lake. Itâs not the action of people who have any choice in the matter and in FROZEN RIVER, the reasons for this action are spelled out with a quiet intensity… Read More »
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