At one point in Mike Birbiglia’s DON’T THINK TWICE, a character opines that your 20s are for hope, and your 30s are for realizing how dumb that hope was. Yet this finely observed tragi-comedy of art, commerce, and finding happiness takes a more compassionate view of its characters, an improv group that is having the… Read More »
HIGH-RISE
There is nothing subtle about HIGH-RISE, a savage allegorical satire of manic energy and pointed symbolism. Based on the novel of the same name by J.G. Ballard, it stars Tom Hiddleston as an urbane neurologist about to discover his place in the social order, and Jeremy Irons as The Architect (how Masonic?), the emotionally constipated… Read More »
THE GREEN INFERNO
With an Eli Roth film, one should know what one is getting into, as in, an unspeakably unsettling film that will feature violence, gore, and a side of human nature that does not show the species off to its best advantage.
Listen to GRANDMA
After her granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), has confided to her that she needs an abortion, Elle (Lily Tomlin) cuts right to the heart of the issue. Not the politics, mind you. Nor the question of how a modern teenager like Sage, someone with plenty of birth-control options, found herself in this position. Elle says the… Read More »
PUNISHER — WAR ZONE
THE PUNISHER is many things, but a good movie is not one of them. It is an extended trip to an abattoir. It is a script that makes no sense whatsoever. It is an unsightly mélange of genres trapped in a steel-cage death match. But worst of all, it’s a wasted opportunity. In Ray Stevenson,… Read More »
PIRANHA 3-D
It all began with JAWS. The summer blockbuster that kicked off the summer blockbuster concept, that was fun and well-made and not too taxing on the higher cerebral functions. PIRANHA 3-D is a loving homage to that film made by people who understand what made that film great, and who understand how to make it… Read More »
CIRCUMSTANCE
CIRCUMSTANCE begins in a perfect world before being brought back to the reality with a thud. The perfect world involves the freedom of living an authentic life. The real world, modern day Iran, is a place where lies are the common currency of life, and to behave otherwise is to risk everything, even ones life.… Read More »
SHADOWBOXER — DVD
SHADOWBOXER is that most wonderful of films, the kind that works on every level, but can’t be easily pigeonholed. If the usual pitch session is one line to sum up a script, the pitch for this would have to run to several pages and even then wouldn’t capture what is best about it. Director Lee Daniels… Read More »
GOOD LUCK CHUCK
It’s not like one goes into a film like GOOD LUCK CHUCK with great expectations. And so it is all the more remarkable, dispiriting rather, when even a low bar, a very lowered bar, isn’t met. This flick isn’t just bad, it falls into that rare category of works that are actual harbingers of the… Read More »
FOR A GOOD TIME CALL . . .
It was once written, in far less enlightened times, that when a man marries, one part of his life changes, but when a woman marries, it is her whole life that is changed. Despite significant, if not total, gains in the social and economic equality department between men and women, when it comes to romance,… Read More »