Click here for the flashback interview with Bart Layton for AMERICAN ANIMALS. Sometimes an ending can make or break a film. And so it is with CRIME 101, a thoughtful meditation on what happens when following the rules just doesn’t pay off. The payoff to a narrative that could have used some tightening is not… Read More »
MERCY
It’s a classic film noir set-up with just a dash of Hitchcock. A Los Angeles man in the near future awakens from a drunken binge to find that he’s being accused of murder. And not just any murder. No, he’s stabbed his wife a couple of years into a rough patch in their marriage. To… Read More »
ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD
The 9th film from Quentin Tarantino, aka ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD, takes us back to 1969, and a land of fragile dreams, transactional relationships, and the manifestation of the dark side of it all in the form of Charles Manson (Damon Herriman). Manson himself has but a cameo in the… Read More »
ALL NIGHTER — Gavin Wiesen Interview
I spoke with Gary Wiesen by phone on March 24, 2017, the day his film, ALL NIGHTER, opened in San Francisco. It’s his first comedy, but briskly executed with a true feel for not just the humor, but also the underlying pathos of a father seeking out his estranged daughter with the help of her… Read More »
THE MEDDLER
(A version of this review first appeared in The New Fillmore) The complicated bond between mother and child has never had a better, a funnier, or a more heartwarming cinematic incarnation. Unconditional love and setting boundaries drive the comedy of THE MEDDLER. Written and directed by Loren Scafaria from her own experiences with an adoring… Read More »
THE NICE GUYS
Shane Black has the gift of making films that are nail-bitingly suspenseful and wickedly funny at the same time. He did it with KISS KISS BANG BANG, and he’s done it again with THE NICE GUYS, a stylishly acerbic and decidedly hard-boiled neo-Noir pitting nihilism against idealism during the candy-colored decadence of 1977 Los Angeles.… Read More »
TOO LATE
Kierkegaard, noted Existentialist and proto-Absurdist, once opined that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. As a cinematic exploration of the tragic and comedic implications of that, there is Dennis Hauck’s wistful neo-Noir, TOO LATE, a film that employs a strategic insouciance as it nimbly plays with the time/space continuum… Read More »
YOU’RE KILLING ME
YOU’RE KILLING ME is a wry and delightful black comedy of very bad manners, of which murder may not be the most heinous. In it, a group of hip twenty-somethings on the fringes of show biz negotiate awkward game nights, the finer points of dating etiquette, and the protocols of disposing of a dead body.… Read More »
THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION — Stanley Nelson
When Stanley Nelson started working on THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION, it was seven years ago and he thought the history of that movement was particularly relevant to those times. In 2015, he thinks it’s even more relevant. When I spoke to him on October 1, 2015, the echoes of the Panther movement in… Read More »
A Ho-Hum TERMINATOR GENISYS
Inflated and grandiose, TERMINATOR GENISYS rethinks the Terminator mythos by coming up the novel notion that changing the past might have more than the intended repercussions. Hence, when the John Conner (Jason Clarke, near left) in this timeline sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney, far left) back to 1984 Los Angeles to save John’s mother, Sarah (Emilia Clarke),… Read More »