The most potent image in A NIGHTMARE WAKES, a film that is rife with them, is the juxtaposition of blood and ink as Mary Shelley (Alix Wilton Regan) struggles to produce her novel, Frankenstein or A New Prometheus, putatively the beginning of the science fiction genre (pace fans of Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Trip to… Read More »
THE LITTLE THINGS
THE LITTLE THINGS, or to be precise, “the little things” is a well-thought-out film, and if putting a film together with the pre-fab precision of a Lego® sculpture were all it took to make a great flick, such it would be. Alas, the overweening self-conscious sense of profundity fails to convince even the most willing… Read More »
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI…
The story of ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI was inspired by actual events, which leaves plenty of room for speculation about what Malcolm X, Cassius Clay (shortly to become Muhammad Ali), James Brown, and Sam Cooke talked about in that motel room on February 25, 1964. If it was less the dialectic presented here, what each… Read More »
THE MIDNIGHT SKY
It feels right to have a film about the end of the world be a cold thing, literally and figuratively. And so it is with THE MIDNIGHT SKY, a story set three decades or so in the future is an uncertain blend of personal regret with planetary destruction. Set both in the arctic and in… Read More »
MINARI
MINARI is a powerful contemplation of family, faith, and the American Dream. Seen through the lens of 7-year-old David (Alan S. Kim in a stunning, unselfconscious turn), whose Korean-born parents have moved him, his older sister Anne (Noel Cho), and eventually their grandmother (scene-stealing Youn Yuh-jung) to rural 1980s Arkansas in search of a life… Read More »
I’M YOUR WOMAN
As we learn at the start of I’M YOUR WOMAN, Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) is living a life of comfort, security, and irritating tedium in 1970s suburbia. Ensconced in a mid-century classic in an affluent neighborhood, she is quietly smoking as she goes over where her life when wrong, as in not having children with her… Read More »
NEWS OF THE WORLD
NEWS OF THE WORLD is a somber and sober tale of post-Civil War Texas with few surprises as it wends its way through the mythos of the Old West, unfolding as it does as a metaphor. Or is it an allegory? Perhaps a microcosm of the world’s ills, both then and now? All those elements… Read More »
FATALE
FATALE is a densely plotted and devilishly twisted erotic fantasy of a noir. Filmed with self-conscious style, it offers a variation on FATAL ATTRACTION that is not without merit, yet with a bemused view of womanhood that gives one pause. We are firmly ensconced in the, admittedly noir Madonna/whore paradigm here, but making a woman… Read More »
ANTEBELLUM
Of the many neat twists in ANTEBELLUM, the most disturbing of all is the one that concerns the state of race relations in the modern day, and how slavery still informs it. By contrasting the subtle, and not so subtle, micro-aggressions forced upon people of color in the present with the brutality of slavery as… Read More »
I SAW THE LIGHT
I SAW THE LIGHT was originally set for an autumn 2015 release with an eye towards positioning Tom Hiddleston’s performance as Hank Williams for Oscar™ consideration. I can see why they thought there would be awards buzz. I can also see why they pulled it from its original release date. Hiddleston is brilliant as the… Read More »
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