The continued effort to update and bring “live-action” realism to their classics (e.g., “Dumbo,” “The Jungle Book,” “Beauty and the Beast,”) continues for Disney with The Lion King. It follows the same premise as the 1994 animated feature (as well as “Kimba the White Lion” from which it was lifted) in which a young lion…
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…
Fighting With My Family is a film of weird elements: The city of Norwich, England; wrestling, with all its “fixed but not fake” performances, alternative names and larger than life personalities; a very human and indeed true story of both pursuing and losing out on a dream. Based on the story of Saraya Knight aka…
J.C. Chandor’s (“All Is Lost”) Amazonian heist thriller, Triple Frontier, has a stellar cast and equally impressive cinematography — as some of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars traverse South American rainforests and mountainous peaks to lift hundreds of millions of dollars off a local drug lord. While some of the narrative feels somewhat tired — as…
The director’s chair being filled by established actors is becoming an increasingly popular card for Hollywood to pull these days, albeit with wildly varied results. Up until this point, the receptions of those films in a way mirror the novice auteurs behind the camera; Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born” — perhaps you’ve heard of…
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — John Keats While it is generally agreed that imagination plays a prominent role in artistic creation, it is apparent to all but some academics and literary biographers with a particular agenda, that art cannot exist…
Reinert Kiil is the Norwegian director responsible for the sort-of-okay slasher “Christmas Blood” (“Juleblod”). If that film was a brooding modernization of “Silent Night, Deadly Night” then The House (“Huset”) must be his re-imagining of “The Conjuring.” On the surface it’s an interesting new twist on the familiar, demon-possessed madhouse setup. Two Nazi soldiers are…
