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 »
I’M CHARLIE WALKER — Patrick Gilles Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. I’ve lived in San Francisco for many, many years, and yet I’d never heard the story of Charlie Walker, an African-American man with a dream and a real gift for playing the system against itself. I was delighted to learn about that part of my city’s history… Read More »
FIRESTARTER
A little game I play while watching very bad movies is imagining the joy I will have during the later conversation that I will have about it with John Wilson, Founder and Head Berry of the Golden Raspberry Awards Foundation during our annual interview. The Razzies, as their award is known, even has a special… Read More »
DEATH ON THE NILE
And so with DEATH ON THE NILE (2022), we learn about the man behind the moustaches. That would be Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s cerebral Belgian detective devoted to his “little grey cells” and keeping order in the world. The former gets short shrift, mention-wise, in this adaptation, while the latter rears its compulsive head in… Read More »
CHAOS WALKING
CHAOS WALKING is a somber affair told in muddy earth tones and moribund action. Based on the book The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, it presents New World in the year 2257, a distant planet colonized by religious humans who have brought with them much of what they should have left back… Read More »
TRANSIT
Christian Petzold has done something extraordinary with TRANSIT. Using the novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, he has taken the story of a young German fleeing the Nazis during World War II and transmuted it into a universal story of refugees. By removing the specifics and setting it in the first-world present, the… Read More »
THE WAR WITH GRANDPA
Amid the stale jokes and flat direction to be found in THE WAR WITH GRANDPA, one is subjected to cartoonish takes on elder abuse, child abuse, and I’m pretty sure that the bass didn’t enjoy its time during the fishing sequence. Based on the book of the same name by Robert Kimmel Smith, the film… Read More »
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD
Armando Iannucci, a man possessing a preternatural gift for telling serious stories with a puckish twist, has taken on the classic Dickens tale of David Copperfield, and infused it with sparkling new life while remaining true to the original’s spirit. After all, despite his sometimes cloying sentimentality, Dickens spared his readers nothing when describing the… Read More »
WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE
Based on the novel by Maria Semple, WHERE’D YOU GO BERNADETTE is a tale of artistic vision quashed by its run-ins with the crasser elements of reality, and the consequences of living the resulting inauthentic life with Cate Blanchett perfection as Bernadette, the eccentric anti-social wife of a Seattle Microsoft bigwig. Her skirmishes with her… Read More »
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD
Ah, the timeless tale of a boy and his dragon. As recounted in HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON I and II, it was magical. Even more magical is that the final part of the trilogy, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD is the equal of the first two without being a repeat of either installment.
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