Vincent Gagliostro was an ideal person to ask my pop-quiz question during the second Frameline press day on June 23, 2017. The question was why arts are important in the age of Trump, and Gagliostro, whose film, AFTER LOUIE is the festival’s closing night film, is a man who has worked in many media, some… Read More »
Tiffany Ward & Rob Minkoff Bring MR PEABODY & SHERMAN to Glorious Life
You better be careful when you take on a classic. For more than one generation, Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman were must-see television, as were the other denizens of the Jay Ward animation world, which includes Rocky, Bullwinkle, and Dudley Do-Right. Other adaptations for the big screen of Ward’s work have not been successful,… Read More »
David Burris — THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT
When I spoke with David Burris on December 18, 2014, one of the things I most wanted to talk to him about was getting the accents right in THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT. It’s set in North Carolina, and he used actors from such far-flung places as Australia, England, and Los Angeles. We went on to… Read More »
THE BETTER ANGELS
No plaster saint, nor marble effigy of Abraham Lincoln is to be found in THE BETTER ANGELS. Based on the recollections of Lincoln’s surviving family, as spoken by his cousin about his boyhood in Indiana, this is a Lincoln before the legends had taken root, the Lincoln of great promise whose intellectual curiosity and love… Read More »
CENTURION
CENTURION mixes a thoroughly honorable high-mindedness with frequent and jarring examples of torture porn. While the ethics of using human beings as pawns in political games is the central theme of the story, the execution is less than astute. What may have aspired to be an intelligent action flick is instead a standard chase flick… Read More »
BLIND SPOT: HITLER’S SECRETARY
BLIND SPOT is an oral history released as a feature documentary. Ordinarily, this would be a bad idea, oral histories being low-tech and single camera, but the subject is Traudl Junge and her history is of her years as Hitlers secretary. Filmmakers Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer must have known they were on to something… Read More »
KINSEY
KINSEY opens with the face of Peter Sarsgaard in close-up looking directly into the camera and asking questions of a sexual nature. An offscreen voice stops him when he uses a euphemism for a sexual act. No, says the voice that we will shortly learn is Kinseys, it wont work unless you are completely straightforward,… Read More »
GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK
In a lesser film about Edward R. Murrow and the way he used television to bring down Joseph McCarthy, there would have been the obligatory unburdening scene with his wife. He would articulate the risks involved in what he was undertaking personally, professionally, and financially, have an emotional breakdown of some sort, and Mrs. Murrow… Read More »
BOBBY
It pains me to have to slam a film that so obviously has its heart in the right place, but BOBBY is such an inept and misguided effort that there’s no other option. Taking place on the day when and in the place where, the Ambassador Hotel, that the title character was assassinated, it’s a… Read More »
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
The key moment in Clint Eastwood’s LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA is when General Kuribayashi, the commander of the doomed Japanese forces defending the eponymous island from Amercan invasion, stops the summary execution of two soldiers by their immediate commanding officer for having committed the crime of not dying at their post. Kuribayashi, played by Ken Watanabe, tells… Read More »