Click here to listen to the flashback interview with Emma Stone for THE HELP. POOR THINGS is a glorious gothic fantasy of the grotesque and the macabre rendered with high art and low comedy. Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has found his muse in Emma Stone, who give a performance that blends careful construction with wild abandon.… Read More »
THE IRON CLAW
Click here to listen to the flashback interview with Sean Durkin for MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE. It would be too easy to pigeonhole THE IRON CLAW as a gloss on toxic masculinity in our culture. To be sure, that element is mightily present in Sean Durkin’s poetic tale of fathers and sons. Based on the… Read More »
AMERICAN FICTION
At one point in AMERICANN FICTION, the provocatively named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), notes that there is no moral to his story. Perhaps, though, that >is< the moral. In his adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, Cord Jefferson takes on many issues for which there are no clear-cut answers, but for which the questions… Read More »
MAY DECEMBER
The opening credits for MAY DECEMBER play over a melodramatic score of insistent, skittery chords. Those chords will return, but at moments that to us seem banal, yet in the psyche of the December part of the cast, Gracie Yoo, played by the inimitable Julianne Moore, they signal a worldview not so much at odds… Read More »
PRISCILLA
Rumor has it that the late Lisa Marie Presley was so incensed by the characterization of her father in Sofia Coppola’s PRISCILLA that she vowed to actively denounce the film. This despite the cooperation of her mother, who is also the film’s subject, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley. Further, Elvis Presley Enterprises did not sign off on… Read More »
THE KILLER
David Fincher’s THE KILLER is as methodical as its protagonist, the philosophizing hit man in the midst of pickle that challenges his core nihilistic belief system in which karma doesn’t figure, nor does luck. The irony may be lost on this unnamed protagonist, but not on us as we are treated to a cavalcade of… Read More »
THE HOLDOVERS
It is a tried and true formula, and when it works well, one that can be endearing. Not original, but endearing. And so it is with THE HOLDOVERS, Alexander Payne’s beautifully realized coming-of-age tale set at an exclusive New England boarding school where the real lessons are not the ones taught in the classrooms. This… Read More »
ANATOMY OF A FALL (Anatomie d’une chute)
ANATOMY OF A FALL asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of truth. How the reality that each of us inhabits that may be diametrically different from the one inhabited by the people closest to us. Such is the nature of perception, and the unconscious biases that we all carry that persistently assert themselves despite our… Read More »
EXPEND4BLES
Rarely does a film make me want to plead to the heavens above (and even the denizens below) to make it stop. Just stop. Just stop the projection, turn up the lights, and let us all slink back to resume our regular lives as best we can after the Razzie-worthy trash we have endured. And… Read More »
THE NUN 2
THE NUN 2 is not a complete waste of time. It is a superbly shot film, and directed with a certain understated flair by Michael Chaves, who, along with Taissa Farmiga, gets about as much as can be extracted from an anemic script. The result is decidedly underwhelming, verging on dull despite all the ickiness.… Read More »
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