If INSIDE were a short film, anything up to the Academy™ definition of same, which is to say, 40 minutes or less including the credits, it would be an incisive deconstruction of art as commerce rather than aesthetics driven by a powerful performance by Willem Dafoe. Instead, it runs for 1 hour and 45 minutes,… Read More »
THE NORTHMAN
Those familiar with HAMLET will find some familiar things in Robert Eggers’ THE NORTHMAN, and that is no coincidence. The source material for both is Sjón’s Gesta Danorum (circa 1200) about a prince with both mommy issues and a usurping uncle. Where Shakespeare adapted the story to his time creating an elegantly and eloquently melancholy… Read More »
THE CARD COUNTER
With THE CARD COUNTER, writer/director Paul Schraeder returns to his favorite themes of sin and redemption. This is no tidy tale of a fall from grace precipated by a rash decision or a moment of weakness. We have at the center a flawed man with dark impulses that he cannot control once they have been… Read More »
SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME
There is such a delicious and perfectly logical, surprise in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, that it alone would be worth the investment of your time and your money to see it in a theater. Fortunately, there is so much more to enjoy as Peter Parker (Tom Holland) and those in his orbit face a future… Read More »
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Flames are never far from Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), starting with those lapping near, but not too near, his heels as he exits the house that he’s just set alight over the body he’s deposited beneath the floorboards. In Guillermo del Toro’s oneiric vision of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, NIGHTMARE ALLEY. Notice, too, the… Read More »
THE LIGHTHOUSE
A dark and twisted fever dream of a film, THE LIGHTHOUSE confronts the anguish of the human condition with suitable horror and an equally suitable dash of absurdity. Rendered in disturbing grades of black and white, it presents two men tending a lighthouse on a desolate rocky outcropping in the middle of nowhere. In the… Read More »
AQUAMAN
The good news is that Momoa and his mammoth charm more than carry a film that is decidedly not the most original of super-hero tales.
THE GREAT WALL
THE GREAT WALL is a big, blustery action-adventure flick in the classic mold, but with one exception. There’s no damsel in distress here. Instead, the winsome lady of the piece is a warrior with nerves of steel and no fear of heights. Kudos there. Not everywhere, but definitely there. Set somewhere in the 11th century,… Read More »
DAYBREAKERS
DAYBREAKERS is a film that has run through 99% of its good ideas by the time the opening credits have concluded. At least the stylish, if occasionally obvious, art direction gives the audience something to occupy its collective self as the half-baked tale unfolds. The time is 2019, and a bat-borne plague has turned all… Read More »
FINDING NEMO
After seeing FINDING NEMO, you just gotta ask yourself, is Pixar capable of making a bad film? Or even a mediocre one? Whether a serendipitous confluence of talent or a sign that there is some divine being at work in our world, either way, the answer, I think, must be no. There is a touch… Read More »