Surprisingly again, Reese Witherspoon (Lead Actress Oscar winner for “Walk the Line”) has settled for signing on the dotted line to partake in a woefully rudimentary romantic comedy. Usually considered somewhat of a spark plug in her plucky-type of roles (“Legally Blonde” being the most revered), Witherspoon is curiously reduced to playing what amounts to…
Have you noticed that little voice in the back of your head that keeps chattering all the time? You know, the one that just asked, “What voice?” Only a short time ago, my own voice was telling me about all the people in my life that I had let down and how I had failed…
In Israeli-American director Joseph Cedar’s masterful film, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, a ridiculously expensive pair of shoes given as a gift leads to a friendship between rising Israeli politician Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi, “Encirclements”) and Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere, “Time Out of Mind”), an American businessman, consultant…
Passengers, the newest Sony Pictures (Village Roadshow) release, directed by Morten Tyldum (“The Imitation Game”), is a visually stunning outer space adventure with a very good cast (Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Andy Garcia and Laurence Fishburne) that fails to lift off due to an earth-bound, cliché-ridden script. That last item can be blamed…
Love. Loss. Regret. Betrayal. Pain. Memory. Revenge. Beauty. These are the oh-so-jolly palate of Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford’s haunting, ethereal and quite extraordinary second feature. Ford crafts a remarkable, trifurcated narrative with exquisite precision, slipping between the life, memories and imagination of Susan Morrow (Amy Adams, “Arrival”) in a way that demands attention, stirs the…
Set in fictional Wessex County in south-west England in the 1870s, Thomas Vinterberg’s (“The Hunt”) adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd chronicles the ups and downs of Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan, “Inside Llewyn Davis”), a smart, headstrong woman who is fiercely proud of her independence when it comes to choosing suitors….
It is no secret that the last decade has not been kind to the great filmmaker, Woody Allen. Whether is it a loss of touch or focus, one could argue that Allen hasn’t made a particularly good film since 1989’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” — while he has had minor successes in the past decade, there…
