In a pivotal scene in James Vanderbildt’s NUREMBERG, it is 1945 and the judge tasked with finding a legal reason to hold an international tribunal to try the defeated Nazi leaders as war criminals has his first meeting with the Army psychiatrist tasked with evaluating the first 22 putative defendants for their fitness to stand… Read More »
DEATH OF A UNICORN
As Fitzgerald summed it up so well a century or so ago, the rich are difference than you and me, and Alex Scharfman’s sly black comedy, DEATH OF A UNICORN, expounds on that beautifully while also pointing up where the not nearly as rich fall short when in thrall to the 1%. There is nothing… Read More »
NOSFERATU
David Eggers, who has a vision of such specific originality and clarity that it might well become a horror subgenre at some point, has taken on not just one iconic film in NOSFERATU, but two, both of whose imagery have become part of the cultural landscape even for those who have never seen NOSFERATU (1922)… 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 »
RADIOACTIVE
RADIOACTIVE tells a story of scientific curiosity in a world where personality skews the perception of the work itself, and politics are never far from the equation. It lays bare not just the injustice of that, but also its stupidity
TERMINATOR: DARK FATE
And so we discover with TERMINATOR: DARK FATE that time is not an endless loop where events repeat zoetrope fashion. Rather it is a curly-cue, not unlike a fusilli. So it is that in this version of the saga, the apocalypse that was/will be Skynet never happened, and John Connor is a name unknown in… Read More »
1945
The Oscars™ are not always the most reliable barometer of cinematic greatness. Let us remember the year that KRAMER VS. KRAMER beat out APOCALYPSE NOW. This year’s oversights were less egregious, and I am delighted that A FANTASTIC WOMAN won the Best Foreign Language prize. I am still miffed, though, that 1945 wasn’t even nominated… Read More »
SON OF SAUL
The first image in SON OF SAUL is a green landscape that is out of focus. There is the sound of someone in distress, and the image of a man walking towards the camera until his impassive face fills the screen and comes into focus. Much else comes into focus in the course of this… Read More »