HOUSE OF GUCCI is a ramshackle accretion of muddled plots studded with oddly incoherent character development and performances that range from stock (Al Pacino) to enigmatic (Adam Driver). This overlong effort takes a tale of sex, money, and power among the super rich and renders it into a dull slog brightened only by Lady Gaga’s… Read More »
THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE
For all the meticulous detail in THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE about the early life of Tammy Faye Bakker, this biopic about the rise of fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker has an ending that is curiously sparse. It’s not just Tammy Faye’s second marriage to Roe Messner that is erased, though he does… Read More »
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
Based on the remarkable life of James Brooke, EDGE OF THE WORLD is an introspective film about how an Englishman became the Raja of Sulawak. Such was his fame in Victorian England that Joseph Conrad used him as the model for the title character in his novel, Lord Jim, and rich women proposed marriage to… Read More »
DREAM HORSE
DREAM HORSE is the heartwarming and uplifting film that is sets out to be. Unpretentious as the working class folks that this based-on-actual-events story celebrates, it tells the classic underdog story of the race horse that evokes sneers from professionals and aristocrats before he puts them all in their places. If it sounds formulaic, it… Read More »
ENFANT TERRIBLE
At one point, late in in ENFANT TERRIBLE, the titular character of this bio-pic, omnisexual filmmaker and agent provacateur of the German New Wave, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Oliver Masucci), calls himself an uber-pig. It’s part boast, part confession, and part apology. As seen in Oskar Roehler’s stunningly oneiric film, they are all consistent with the… Read More »
THE COURIER
Based on a true story, THE COURIER takes us back to the Cold War and the palpable threat of nuclear annihilation. Once again, we are reminded that it was as much luck as it was diplomacy or mutually assured destruction that prevented World War III. In this case, the good luck of two people for… Read More »
SILK ROAD
There is a wealth of confirmation to be found about many of our worst nightmares in SILK ROAD, a cautionary tale of stereotypes, specialization, and the consequences of absolute freedom. Based on an article by David Kushner in Rolling Stone, it charts the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson), a 20-something idealist of… Read More »
DARA OF JASENOVAC
DARA OF JASENOVAC is a brutal film about a lesser-known part of the Holocaust. Based on the testimony of survivors, it expounds on Jasenovac, the only Fascist concentration camps in World War II that were not run by the Nazis themselves. Instead, inspired and advised by the Nazis, they were established by the Roman Catholic… Read More »
JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH
The religious overtones of JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH come towards the end of this searing examination of racial politics during the 1960s. And when they arrive, in a sequence that is most assuredly a shout-out to the Last Supper, director/co-writer Shaka King has earned the right, and then some, to invoke the metaphor. The… Read More »
A NIGHTMARE WAKES
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 »
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