COCAINE BEAR is a joyously peculiar amalgam of carnage, comedy, and horror that respects few rules of cinematic storytelling aside from insuring that (spoiler alert) the dog is okay. It’s an impudent thing that thumbs its nose at convention while seeing to it that, despite broken laws and the slaughter of innocent (and not so… Read More »
EMILY
EMILY begins with its titular character, Emily Brontë (Emma Mackey) swooning. It’s a cleverly deceptive beginning to the story of a 19th-century rebel, and of the inspirations for her masterpiece of gothic fiction, Wuthering Heights. As played by Mackey, with an immersive and experiential script by screenwriter, Frances O’Connor, Emily is anything but the delicate,… Read More »
MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE
Narrated with precocious prescience by a character too young to see the film on her own (or parts of the stage show within it at all), MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE asks the age-old question, “What do women want?” This being a film about a preternaturally talented male stripper, the answer can only be a lap… Read More »
KNOCK AT THE CABIN
Perhaps it’s having a child at the center of a film that provides M. Night Shyamalan with the added spark necessary to making a solid, thoroughly enjoyable film. I refer not just to THE SIXTH SENSE, which catapulted the director to rock star filmmaker status, but also to WIDE AWAKE, the film just before that… Read More »
INFINITY POOL
With INFINITY POOL Brandon Cronenberg continues his father’s great tradition of unsettling images and quasi-familiar realities. He diverges in that, for all the normalization of the disquieting, in that he fails to evince the same undertone impish glee at the macabre so evident in even the elder Mr. Cronenberg’s darkest works. Still, he… Read More »
WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD
WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD is a melancholy comedy about blindness and boundaries. Grounded by performances by Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard that are wonders of anger and pain and absurdity, it examines the volatile emotions lurking beneath a family’s thin veneer of civility as it reaches a breaking point when reality intrudes on… Read More »
BABYLON
In BABYLON, Damien Chazelle has given us several films about the last hurrah of silent films and the birth of synchronized sound. Some of them are good, some of them are muddled, and one of them is superb. Chazelle’s ambitious attempt to encapsulate a time and place provokes respect for the effort, even when it… Read More »
SHE SAID
SHE SAID is a compelling story that is well told by director Maria Schrader and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Based on the book of the same name by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, it follows those two New York Times reporters as they crack the story of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape… Read More »
THE GOOD NURSE
There are two villains in THE GOOD NURSE, the based on the true-crime book by Charles Graeber, and the first English-language film from Tobias Lindholm (ANOTHER ROUND, THE HUNT). One villain is the serial killer, Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) who worked for years as a nurse killing patients while raising suspicions, but never prosecutions, at… Read More »
HALLOWEEN ENDS
HALLOWEEN ENDS fulfills its promise to take the battle between Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers (unknown shape played by James Jude Courtney) to its limits. Boasting four writers, including director and purveyor of the franchise reboot, David Gordon Green, this excursion takes us, alas, into muddled waters. Myers, on the loose since… Read More »
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