The great Japanese director Hiorkazu Koreeda (“The Third Murderer”) continues his exploration of the true meaning of family In Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku), a quest he began in his award-winning 2013 film, “Like Father, Like Son.” Winner of the Palme d’Or award at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and the first Japanese film to win the…
Robert Redford (“Our Souls at Night”) is an American icon and, in David Lowery’s (“A Ghost Story”) The Old Man and the Gun, has ostensibly made his final curtain call as an actor. Adapted by Lowery from a 2003 article in the New Yorker about Forrest Tucker by David Grann (“The Lost City of Z”),…
In 1915, D. W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation” was released, en route to becoming one of the most influential and controversial films in cinema history. Griffith’s historical epic created indelible imprints on film content and style, particularly in the areas of racial representation and editing. A century later, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman attempts…
The favorable trend as of late is the recurring gimmick of gender-switching casting in films of previous familiarity. The craze was recently ignited — seemingly — by the 2016 Paul Feig-directed “Ghostbusters” estrogen-driven remake to this year’s earlier released “Overboard” remake with Anna Faris and Eugenio Derbez demonstrating the sex role reversal routine. So who…
Mexican cartels are bad and Emily Blunt is good. These are the main takeaways from the generic sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which serves only as an overlong, unnecessary reminder of how gripping Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 predecessor was. This continuation of the story that follows government agents embroiled in the drug war jettisons Blunt’s…
“Just another Wednesday,” the visibly fatigued nurse exclaims as she tends to a bullet wound of one of the guests of her dimly lit, blood spattered hotel for crooks. The only rules of the underground institution: No guns, no cops, and no killing of other guests. Throughout the film’s jaunting plot we watch thieves, assassins…
You know how, when you draw a bath and the water’s too hot to get into, so you let it sit there for a while but when you come back it’s too cold to get into, thus rendering it kind of useless? That’s what 211 is like. It’s tepid, lifeless, waste of time (if not…
