Click here to listen to the interview. Paul Weitz, who directed Lily Tomlin in the criminally underappreciated GRANDMA a few years back, was delighted to be invited by her and her Grace & Frankie co-star, Jane Fonda, to write a script for them. The result is MOVING ON, a deeply human black comedy about… Read More »
MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE
Narrated with precocious prescience by a character too young to see the film on her own (or parts of the stage show within it at all), MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE asks the age-old question, “What do women want?” This being a film about a preternaturally talented male stripper, the answer can only be a lap… Read More »
ON THE COUNT OF THREE
Jerrod Carmichal is a quietly compelling presence in his directorial debut, ON THE COUNT OF THREE. As Val, half of a suicidal duo out to make the last day of their lives count for something, or at least to make it a day less depressing than the ones that have so far rounded out their… Read More »
THE NORTHMAN
Those familiar with HAMLET will find some familiar things in Robert Eggers’ THE NORTHMAN, and that is no coincidence. The source material for both is Sjón’s Gesta Danorum (circa 1200) about a prince with both mommy issues and a usurping uncle. Where Shakespeare adapted the story to his time creating an elegantly and eloquently melancholy… Read More »
RIDERS OF JUSTICE
It’s impossible to pigeon-hole RIDERS OF JUSTICE. Part tragedy, part very black comedy, part action/revenge, it is nevertheless also a perceptive examination of troubled souls longing for surcease of sorrow for whom the usual therapeutic methods have failed. If that were all, it would be enough, but it goes further, essaying nothing less than a… Read More »
CRUELLA
It’s somewhere In the third act that CRUELLA goes from being a frothy Disney confection to a Guy Ritchie knock off. Until then, this origin story about the woman who wanted to turn 101 dalmatians into outer wear is pure eye candy with a villainess more deliciously reprehensible than Cruella herself, and even more overdressed.… Read More »
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
It’s only right that a revenge story with a savage punch line should also have a savage sense of humor. And so it is with PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, a tale of rage against the patriarchy in which the testosterone-heavy are not the only problem, and one woman’s refusal to let a crime go unacknowledged makes… Read More »
I AM LISA
One can approach I AM LISA as a very cool horror film in which the power structure is challenged by the supernatural. One can also approach it as a scathingly brilliant dialectic on feminism in several of its waves. Either way one comes away from this deliciously atmospheric, intellectually nimble excursion into lycanthropy, wildly entertained… Read More »
BLOODSHOT
Where to begin with BLOODSHOT, a derivative lump of lethargy that taints the thrill of the plot twist, and renders an action sequence in plummeting elevators dully predictable? Right down to the quips. Powered solely by Vin Diesel’s star power, it is overwritten and under cogitated, with special effects that aren’t. Diesel is still a… Read More »
THE ASSIGNMENT
The subject matter in Walter Hill’s THE ASSIGNMENT will make half the audience cringe in a way that the other half, no matter how empathetic, won’t be able to fully understand. And that’s sly. This brutal exercise in gender studies, masquerading as a biting action-noir fable, is rife with irony and with bald truths designed… Read More »