If your children suggest that you operate within “your zone of resiliency,” you might want to look into what soap opera they’ve been watching, or whether they have gotten their hands on a convoluted movie script, the sort readily available in Mike Mills (“20th Century Women”) C’mon C’mon, a film inspired by Mills’ relationship with…
Shakespeare’s Richard III famously said I can smile, and murder while I smile. The Joker has long been a character who will smile and cackle while he murders and terrorizes. In previous cinematic incarnations, the Joker has been a crime boss fried in acid (Jack Nicholson), an anarchic terrorist (Heath Ledger) and a pimped out…
Sure the Clown Prince of Crime got his accolades in “The Dark Knight,” but now with Joker it seems he’s finally gotten a film all to himself that he’s been deserving of. And it sure has a dark, dark Bernhard Goetz tone to it. Turns out Batman’s archnemesis was just an “ordinary” guy, living with…
“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home” — John Howard Payne The Smothers Brothers they are not. Brothers Eli (John C. Reilly, “Kong: Skull Island”) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix, “You Were Never Really Here”) Sisters, known to all as the Sisters Brothers, are deadly…
It is a bold filmmaker who trusts film as film and allows the medium to communicate without recourse to exposition and dialogue. Such a filmmaker is Lynne Ramsey (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”), whose latest offering, You Were Never Really Here, is a brilliantly brutal assembly of image and sound that never displays any…
I will approach this review a little differently if you don’t mind. But allow me first to tell you a little story. I made an irrational choice. I started my review for Irrational Man before I even saw the movie. Irrational indeed. I started this review before I even knew whether this movie was going…
There’s walking in circles and then there’s walking in circles the Paul Thomas Anderson way. Whatever that means. Not that it matters. Who cares, anyway? A flippant attitude for a flippant movie. Except that Inherent Vice, Anderson’s latest and possibly his worst, is 150 minutes of flippancy, a wacky stumble into safe, though awfully off-putting…
