It's strange when a movie feels both consummate and tossed off. Such are the eccentricities of talent and craft.
BLACK BAG, written by David Koepp, is WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF by way of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY with a dash of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot to season the salad.
A good light meal-totally passable, even enjoyable- to be served with chilled wine with friends at a dinner. Much like the one that kicks off this movie.
BLACK BAG follows …
Read MoreA dynamite movie, even if the ending falters into a kind of conventionality the rest of the film miraculously avoids, ONE EYED JACKS is great for what it IS and an all-time movie "what if" for what it could have been.
For you see, dear readers, ONE EYED JACKS, a western about sensitive outlaw Rio (Brando) joining up with a bank robbery gang so he can get revenge on Sheriff Dad Longworth (Malden), the man who double crossed him five years ago, was originally supposed to be directed by Stanley Kubrick.
So let's start with …
Read MoreEvery April since 2010, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) — the beloved cable channel and cultural institution that broadcasts classic films around the clock — has hosted a remarkable festival in the heart of Hollywood. While Los Angeles is never short on revival screenings, the TCM Classic Film Festival offers cinephiles something rare: the chance to experience classic films the way they were meant to be seen — on the big screen, in historic theaters, surrounded by fellow lovers of cinema. And if that’s not enough, many screenings feature special guests, from legendary filmmakers, stars, historians, and preservationists to TCM’s own knowledgeable and charismatic hosts.
Like many film buffs, I grew up …
Read MoreA beautiful movie about the lives of three Indian women-Prabha, Anu, and Parvathy-who work at a hospital clinic in Mumbai, ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT is a quietly daring movie about female independence and agency in a culture straddling ancient traditions and rapid modernity.
Written and directed by an Indian woman and winner of last year's Cannes Grand Prix award, ALL THAT WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT is that rare recent film that …
Read MorePablo Berger's feature animated ROBOT DREAMS goes from simple to complex to unsettling to accepting. Like the stages of grief. It's a fascinating movie that doesn't fully come together and yet. . .it conveys that feeling of finding appreciation for a past relationship that you accept can never be again.
The story follows a lonely single Dog in an alternate reality 1980's New York who purchases a Robot as a companion. The two become fast friends only to have …
Read MoreEuropean limited TV series have yielded some of the greatest cinematic works of all time. And while American TV in the age of cable and streaming has produced its fair share of THE WIRES, BREAKING BADS, TRUE DETECTIVE SEASON 1's, TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN, and so on, it really is a stunner how much critically important cinematic work has come out of European TV.
Ingmar Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE and FANNY & ALEXANDER, Kryztof Kieslowski's THE DECALOGUE, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, Lars Von Trier's THE KINGDOMS I, II, & III, Mike Leigh's NUTS IN MAY among many other TV movies in the 1970's, are just the tip of the iceberg of incredible work.
And so it is with Italian master moviemaker Francesco Rosi's CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI…
Read MoreSome movies you come to right away. Some take half a lifetime to be ready for.
Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, a masterpiece of Italian post-neorealism, was a movie this writer wasn't ready for until he was 47.
It is a bracing and profound movie. Driven by currents of melodrama and emotion until exploding into a tempest of near-operatic intensity, ROCCO is also intimate-a story of one family trying to keep its head above the raging tides of change, urbanization, and societal judgement.
Visconti, born an Italian aristocrat, is a kind of Franklin Delano Roosevelt of film. Comfortable and understanding of money and the rich yet compelled by the struggle of the poor, Visconti made movies about all the classes struggling in the ever-changing now.
Interestingly…
Read MoreAn inventive documentary set to a jazz beat about the political crisis in the DR Congo just after its independence from Belgian colonial rule in the late 1950's, early 1960's, SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT is a complicated piece of movie music.
Belgian filmmaker Grimonprez and his editor Rik Chaubet take footage-American jazz musicians on ambassador tours in the Congo, Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and the political figures surrounding his struggle, even TV commercial and pop culture footage of that era.
They then cut them into a documentary jazz piece-pulsing, be-bopping, as they tell the story. Quotes, footnotes, images, moments percuss like a great midnight jazz jam.
The effect, at least for this viewer, is…
Read MoreA complex movie that feels like it might not totally work until it does, NICKEL BOYS is that rare species of bird: a movie that works towards a new film language.
Based on the Pulitzer prize winning 2019 novel THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead, the movie follows the budding friendship of two black teens-studious Elwood Curtis and pessimistic pragmatic Turner-during their time at the abusive Nickel Academy reform school in Florida.
The innovation here is to frame much of the movie in the filmic first person. We see the story…
Read MoreThis past January, I spent ten days in Amsterdam.
When I was walking one foggy afternoon with my fiance down the gorgeous canals, an advertisement for an exhibit at the Eye Filmmuseum caught my gaze — called INNER LANDSCAPES.
Intrigued by a wide and tall image of a rolling green hill with a silhouette, I leaned in closer and saw an ad for an exhibit curating the work of a filmmaker with whom I was not yet familiar — that of renowned, Palme’Dor winning auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
Discovering a new great filmmaker is always …
Read MoreSome movies you approach with humility.
This writer LOVED this movie. But since it feels so nakedly a satire, a coming of age trans story, a layered comedic takedown of what is "mainstream" and what is "outsider", this writer also feels he has to write with the openness that he most likely missed a lot.
But like Jane Schoenbrun's 2024 trans fable I SAW THE TV GLOW, THE PEOPLE'S JOKER is so intense, so creative, so well made, the moviemakers accomplish one of the essential possibilities in cinema: they communicate a life experience and world view that makes our world a little bigger.
This is a crazy movie and a legal IP nightmare. Basically…
Read MoreThere's a lot going on in Romanian moviemaker Radu Jude's very funny satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.
Young gig-worker, TV & commercial production assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache) drives around traffic-riddled Bucharest filming wounded workers so that an Austrian production company can pick their favorite for a safety helmet commercial.
Angela, exhausted, overworked, makes vulgar Tik Tok videos to pass the time. She uses …
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