Not every documentary can necessarily be believed. By their very nature, a documentary claims a certain amount of nonfiction status, but claiming that status and actually being nonfiction are two wholly different things. It would not surprise me in any… Read More ›
The new film “Stage Mother,” directed by Thom Fitzgerald with a script from Brad Joseph Hennig is one of those movies which may be obvious and stilted and all too easy, but which still manages some level of success. The… Read More ›
Every once in a while—happily only a once in a great while—I come across a movie which is, for lack of a more descriptive term (we’ll get to that exploration later), bad, but, which also fails to engender anger. Perhaps… Read More ›
There are many films which leave themselves open to interpretation. Depending on the interpretation one takes, a film can either be enjoyable or disappointing. Watching the new adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” my viewpoint on the movie made it an… Read More ›
Earlier this summer, I wrote about a movie where Stellan Skarsgård puts in a brief appearance. I noted that the movie was gorgeous and well-considered. I also talked about how it was desperately bleak and how I had no desire… Read More ›
There is an interesting question posed by “Summerland” at the outset of writer/director Jessica Swale’s film. We initially meet Alice (played by Penelope Wilton) in 1975. Disturbed from her writing by some kids raising money, she yells at them and… Read More ›
For whatever reason, we have to suffer through horrible fiction tropes across multiple types of media, things that make no sense and yet keep popping up over and over again. One trope that I find particularly heinous is, “no, we… Read More ›
Some films, even if one knows nothing else about them, are quite clearly based on a true story. Every element of story structure screams it. This does not, in and of itself, make a work good or bad, it is… Read More ›
Regularly when one watches a biopic, there is a written postscript which talks about what happens to the character(s) and/or their work (good or bad). “Radioactive,” a movie about Marie Curie, doesn’t eschew a few closing notes, but, wonderfully, incorporates… Read More ›
Sometimes movies function on all cylinders, everything working towards a single goal. Other times—perhaps more often—elements of a film are at odds with each other. These disparate elements may simply not mesh well or they could work actively against one… Read More ›
While watching writer-director Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s latest film, “The Truth,” I couldn’t shake the fact that there was something very familiar about it. Perhaps the fact that it was selected for both Venice and TIFF caused it to lodge in my… Read More ›
In the first few minutes of the new David Bautista film, “My Spy,” there are references to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Iron Man 2,” and “Notting Hill.” There are also a bunch of jokes based on diegetic needle drops (okay,… Read More ›
The most impressive thing about writer-director David Koepp’s “You Should Have Left” (which is based on the novel by Daniel Kehlmann) is that it is not content with simply offering up an exploration of whether Kevin Bacon’s Theo Conroy’s dark… Read More ›
Watching a movie there is often a push-and-pull where one’s head fights their heart (or vice versa). Logically speaking, the characters are acting in incredibly dumb ways, ways sure to result in poor outcomes. Emotionally speaking, the characters are trapped… Read More ›
As always when I tackle horror, I come at it from an “intrigued by the genre but certainly not an expert in the minutiae” stance (there are sites which focus solely on horror and do so wonderfully). And, stating that,… Read More ›
As Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” moves back and forth between the past and the present, Vietnam and the United States, open war and hidden, it becomes clear that we are watching Lee is at his best. More than that… Read More ›
Sometimes the movie you’re watching isn’t the movie you think you’re watching. Worse, sometimes it’s not the movie those behind it think they’ve made. With “The King of Staten Island” Judd Apatow has indeed created yet another film about adult… Read More ›
Imagine a movie about a widowed father who has been searching for a missing son for years. The father’s second son is still around, now married with a teenager of his own, but the father sees right past him, always… Read More ›
There is something to be said for moody films which contemplate what it means to be alive and what it means to die on one’s own terms. Nicolaj Coster-Waldau’s latest, “Exit Plan,” is just that – a movie that examines… Read More ›
It would be unfair to say that once the credits start rolling on Josephine Decker’s “Shirley” one will ask why they bothered watching it all the way through. The answer to that is Elisabeth Moss. Yet again proving herself to… Read More ›
