“You can kill me if you want. I kind of wish you would.” Once Upon a River is a 92-minute, independent film that marks Haroula Rose’s debut as a feature film director, and an impressive first feature it is. Based on the novel published in 2011 by Bonnie Joe Campbell, a writer who has been…
Director James Gray, whose last film, “The Lost City of Z,” garnered serious praise upon release in 2016, has continued his win streak in the exploratory sci-fi film Ad Astra, the Latin phrase for “to the stars.” This Brad Pitt vehicle stands as a powerful character study within a plausible near-future universe, with a hefty…
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing… Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore” — Naomi Shihab Nye Though it is a genre that often flounders on an excess of sentimentality, first-time writer-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’ The Peanut Butter Falcon…
Missing Link, Laika’s latest stop-motion animated feature, opens not unlike an Indiana Jones entry. Our protagonist, Sir Lionel Frost (voiced by Hugh Jackman, “ The Greatest Showman”), along with his assistant, attempt to take pictures of the Loch Ness Monster. However, Frost quickly loses control of the situation, and despite his own precision and deftness,…
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein As a boy growing up in Washington Heights, Manhattan, I spent many weekends walking the streets of New York, particularly the Bronx which I walked almost…
Cinema has long been home to inspirational “true story” interpretations, operating as a vessel through which filmmakers can translate fact into fiction. There’s an audience for it, so the biopic genre and its various filtered offshoots continue to be a mainstay of mainstream movies. There’s a seemingly endless collection of personalities and adventures to choose…
The Last Suit (El Último Traje), the second feature film by writer/director Pablo Solarz (“Intimate Stories”) is an Argentine/Spain production that follows the journey of Abraham Bursztein (Miguel Ángel Solá, “The Impatient Alchemist”) an 88-year-old holocaust survivor who found refuge in Argentina, where he created a life for himself, working as a tailor and raising…
