Is this really how it all ends? A ragged bit of doggerel to finish out the cinematic X-Men saga? Or at least this incarnation of same. What started as a trenchant study of human nature at its best and worst, as well as a scathingly good time at the movies has, with DARK PHOENIX, devolved… Read More »
READY PLAYER ONE
With Steven Spielberg, sometimes, most of the time, you get E.T: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL. Sometimes, though, you get 1941. It’s not that READY PLAYER ONE rivals the sheer ineptitude of the latter, but it is definitely skirting the shoals. With Spielberg, one has come to expect much, and so when presented with a flick that is… Read More »
Dreary DARK PLACES
DARK PLACES is awash with dark moodiness as it tells a raggedy story that suffers from a failure of to find a narrative structure as strong or as compelling as the performance of his star, Charlize Theron. Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, on whose novel of the same name GONE GIRL was based,… Read More »
THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT’s Heart of Darkness
In retrospect, the excesses of Abu Ghraib were all too accurately predicted by the now infamous behavioral experiment conducted in 1971 by Stanford professor, Dr. Philip Zimbardo (Billy Crudup). The dramatization as THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT wisely takes the clinical approach, employing the detachment of the scientific method in recreating the events that are as… Read More »