Wild Tales from Argentina
Whichever anonymous Old Testament author coined the phrase “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” was dispensing sage advice. One of the lessons that wise people learn from experience is that the taste of…
Timothy Spall is simultaneously repellent and spellbinding in Mr. Turner
Having now finally seen Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, I need to add another name to my list of performances worthy of a Best Actor Oscar that didn’t even get shortlisted among the nominees….
Losing her mind, finding her essence
For all the eminently justifiable hand-wringing about the persistent disproportionately low number of toothsome Hollywood roles for women, one can’t help noticing that some years seem to be especially juicy ones for male…
The mesmerizing mishmash of Jupiter Ascending
First things first: If, in spite of all the reviews that are piling up utterly trashing the Wachowski siblings’ new space epic Jupiter Ascending, you still plan to go see it, if only…
J. K. Simmons terrorizes aspiring jazz musicians terrifically in Whiplash
What makes a great cinema villain? On paper we look for a bit of nuance and moral ambiguity, but on the big screen, we tend to like our bad guys to be at…
American Sniper offers simplistic view of Iraq War, veterans’ issues
Confession: I’m reviewing American Sniper this week only because every new movie opening last week was getting uniformly abysmal reviews elsewhere. Normally I’m reluctant to let any of my entertainment budget flow into…
Slick cyberterrorism thriller Blackhat is mostly empty calories
It’s always a little intriguing when a new movie is released and its reviews are all over the map, from one star to five. What did one critic see in this flick, one…
Rob Marshall adapts Sondheim’s Into the Woods to the silver screen
Fairyland has long been the setting for human nightmares as well as our frothier, happier dreams. Plumbing the dark side of fairytales and their Jungian archetypes on the page, onstage and onscreen has…
The Battle of Five Armies brings Jackson’s Middle Earth tour to worthy finale
There is something so simultaneously satisfying and melancholy about coming to the last page of a great novel – especially when the reader knows that the author is deceased and there is no…
Redmayne channels Hawking spectacularly
With both films receiving wide theatrical release nearly simultaneously, it’s difficult to write about James Marsh’s Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything without doing a “compare and contrast” with another serious film…
