The whodunnit provides a certain kind of cinematic pleasure. The crime which is never straightforward. The host of suspects, all with motives and sometimes conflicting alibis. The elaborately twisting plot where half the fun is not knowing and the other half finding out. Through the decades and across media from literature to film to television…
Feast of the Seven Fishes is a Christmas romance movie, and it is certainly one of the more unique and enjoyable ones I’ve seen in recent years. The Italian tradition of the feast of the seven fishes on Christmas Eve isn’t an event I knew much about, so it was nice to learn of the…
The World War II satire Jojo Rabbit is a daring mockery with war-themed carnage as a surreal backdrop that combines misplaced idolization with an unconventional coming-of-age tale for a young boy. Indeed, filmmaker Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok”) is wading in rough waters with a strange take of unusual growing pains — particularly when his featured…
“What love actually is, is the experience that someone else is all right exactly the way they are.” — Werner Erhard Noah Baumbach’s (“The Meyerowitz Stories”) Marriage Story is a penetrating look at the spiraling effect of divorce American style on those involved, one that radiates compassion for its beleaguered characters Nicole (Scarlett Johansson, “Avengers:…
Gone are the days of 1970s-style “Jiggle TV” . . . you know, that endearing media term reserved for the boob-tube, pop-cultural guilty pleasure that the late mega-television producer Aaron Spelling eagerly supplied to prime time viewers? With it, the ABC network struck a goldmine with the curvy, cops-turned-private investigators from the Townsend Agency in…
Ah, Christmas. A time of Hallmark cinematic splendor, candy canes, and Bath and Body Works candles, it truly can be (to some) the most wonderful time of the year. But what does Hollywood have to offer? Well, with cheaper competition from Netflix and Hallmark, there aren’t as many Christmas-themed gifts put under the movie theater…
As lazy and obvious a comment as this is, Little Monsters is the Australian answer to “Shaun of the Dead.” From the interweaving of domestic and personal issues with the problems of a zombie outbreak, to the referential rendering of the undead and how they operate, writer-director Abe Forsythe displays a snappy wit, a warmth…
