As summer comes to a close, so does the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s 2023 season of free live performances of its scathingly scintillating production of BREAKDOWN. This year, you can also enjoy it as VOD here through 9/4, password PowerToThePeople!, yes the exclamation point is part of the password). Every year the Troupe takes on… Read More »
THE INFERNAL MACHINE
THE INFERNAL MACHINE begins as a spare and tense film driven by Guy Pearce’s measured performance as tormented author Bruce Cogburn. Alas, not even Pearce’s fine work as Cogburn slowly unravels from years of guilt can make up for a script whose third act becomes cryptically obtuse, rather than dynamically charged, before it just goes… Read More »
THE BOB’S BURGERS MOVIE
THE BOB’S BURGER MOVIE gives us a few origin stories for the long-running animated sit-com artfully woven into a brand-new musical adventure. Far from playing out as an extended episode of the series, it expands to fill its feature-length running time with a murder mystery, a financial crisis, and a nifty low-speed chase involving an… Read More »
CYRANO
Joe Wright has a genius for taking the stories we know all too well and making them feel like a delightful new discovery. Seek no further than his take on ANNA KARENINA (interview here), which, pace fans of Garbo and Leigh, is my favorite adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic. Is it absolutely true to the source… Read More »
MARY POPPINS RETURNS
It’s a testament to just how good MARY POPPINS RETURNS is that the weakest part of this sequel to the 1964 film is the sequence with Meryl Streep. I hasten to point out the relative nature of the word “weakest”. Like everything else in this practically perfect cinematic exercise, it’s eye-popping and clever as the… Read More »
The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years
The problem confronting any documentary about The Beatles is that of finding something new to say about them. Their music, their personalities, their history, their influences, their influence, the phenomenon of world fame on a scale never seen before or, putatively, since they hit the big time in 1962, it’s all been dissected. So THE… Read More »
LONDON ROAD
LONDON ROAD brilliantly uses the unreality of ordinary people breaking into song to evoke the unreality of a serial killer on the loose on the otherwise unremarkable eponymous street in the otherwise unremarkable small town of Ipswich, England. Based on the Royal National Theatre production, original cast intact, that was, in turn, based on the… Read More »
MAMA MIA!
ABBA, the songsters behind the soundtrack for the musical MAMA MIA!, play and now film, composed bouncy little ditties often revolving around a catch phrase or even just a catch word. Add safe, bubble-gum music and the results were songs that weren’t so much great art as something that would burrow into the listener’s brain… Read More »
NINE
NINE, the film adaptation of the musical adaptation of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 is an interesting film for many reasons. The most striking is the one that sinks the venture, and that would be discovering that Daniel Day Lewis, an actor of considerable power, has his limits. Astounding with only his left foot to work… Read More »
BURLESQUE
BURLESQUE is a heaping helping of corn pone laced with a glittering cascade of glitzy production numbers. Start with a fresh-faced Iowa farm girl, Ali (Christina Aguilera), take her to the bright lights and broken dreams of Hollywood, and in the time it takes to show the montage of her hitting the streets in search… Read More »