The subject matter in Walter Hill’s THE ASSIGNMENT will make half the audience cringe in a way that the other half, no matter how empathetic, won’t be able to fully understand. And that’s sly. This brutal exercise in gender studies, masquerading as a biting action-noir fable, is rife with irony and with bald truths designed… Read More »
PASSENGERS
PASSENGERS is a long, increasingly preposterous slog whose most tantalizing element is the question of why Jennifer Lawrence looks so very much like a young Renee Zellweger in some shots. Has there always been such a striking resemblance, or is it that this film is so tedious and predictable that one has the time to… Read More »
THE NICE GUYS
Shane Black has the gift of making films that are nail-bitingly suspenseful and wickedly funny at the same time. He did it with KISS KISS BANG BANG, and he’s done it again with THE NICE GUYS, a stylishly acerbic and decidedly hard-boiled neo-Noir pitting nihilism against idealism during the candy-colored decadence of 1977 Los Angeles.… Read More »
PAPA: HEMINGWAY IN CUBA
The greatest virtue of PAPA: HEMINGWAY IN CUBA is that it was filmed in Cuba just after it was re-opened to the United States. It still looks the way it did over 50 years ago, when the story is set, which not too long before the United States embargo, protesting Castro’s revolution, went into place.… Read More »
LAKEVIEW TERRACE
Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) has very definite ideas about how things should be. His children, an adolescent daughter and a son a bit younger, must use proper grammar at all times, and there are rules about who and who can’t be a role model. His new neighbors, she’s black, he’s white, do not fit… Read More »
IN THE LAND OF BLOOD OF HONEY
Films about the state of affairs in the former Yugoslavia made by the people who lived through the times before, during, and after the breakup of that country have what I have termed a savage whimsy to them. The blackest of humor permeates even the most horrific situations (Danis Tanovics NO MANS LAND comes to… Read More »
ADAPTATION
ADAPTATION is the story of one man’s epic quest to adapt the unadaptable. In this case, turning THE ORCHID THIEF by Susan Orlean, into a feature film. The problem is that the non-fiction book is a rambling account of a rogue orchid hunter with the history of orchid mania and a glimpse of contemporary Seminole… Read More »
GOOD THIEF, THE
THE GOOD THIEF is a cheeky little film that uses the excuse of a complicated caper to do a character study. Writer/director Neil Jordan, who adapted this from the 1955 French classic, BOB LE FLANEUR, uses smoke, mirrors, and a sleight of hand to keep things interesting, a magic that is certainly more adept than… Read More »
CABIN FEVER
What we have in CABIN FEVER is the classic tale of city kids out in the deep dark woods with all the attendant mischief that that sort of thing engenders. The saving grace is that these kids are not outstandingly stupid, say, like the Blair Witch kids. You know, the ones that kept crossing and… Read More »
IDLEWILD
IDELWILD starts with a bang, splashing across the screen with a raucous exuberance full of sass, attitude, and an irreverent visual sense that enhances the edginess to the life the protagonists have chosen. If it weren’t for a love story that plops itself in the middle of it, this would have been a classic. As… Read More »