News Vendor: “I’m leaving.” Gordon: “Why?” News Vendor: “I found out I’m Jewish.” Gordon: “But you fought in the war.” News Vendor: “Tell it to the person that threw a rock at my window.” Gordon: “This is Budapest.” Budapest Noir, directed by Éva Gárdos (“American Rhapsody”) transports us to the Budapest of 1936. Zsigmond Gordon…
Choosing a third remake of A Star Is Born, a classic rags-to-riches movie that has a history of attracting legendary talent from Fredric March to Judy Garland, as your directorial debut is a risky move, but it’s one that Bradley Cooper pulls off quite well. The actor’s rise from TV sidekick to cool comic relief…
The term “Cold War,” especially in cinema, usually evokes images of espionage, militarism, geopolitics and stern men speaking tersely in jargon that is only comprehensible to those with a working knowledge of the genre. Pawel Pawlikowski (“The Woman in the Fifth”) defies such expectations with his film Cold War, a starkly beautiful romance that deftly…
Music has long been known to bring people together irrespective of language barriers, and few situations require people to come together as crucially as those in which our lives are at stake. Based on a real life hostage incident in Peru, Bel Canto (“beautiful song”) was originally a book written by Ann Patchett about this…
Two ex-convicts working at a dead-end diner are given an opportunity to change things around when a lawyer proposes a heist, unaware that larger antagonistic machinations are hard at work. While this plotline is fairly standard as far as heist capers are concerned, Hadi Hajaig has cranked the tonal voltage up to eleven by infusing…
They say that reading is fundamental, but the romantic goings-on in the mature rom-com Book Club should be more of a page-turner especially when it involves some of Hollywood’s all-time seasoned and decorated actresses. In a way it is quite refreshing (and rare) to encounter an unconventional romantic comedy catering to senior citizens as the…
“You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from” — Werner Erhard Isabelle (Juliette Binoche, “Ghost in the Shell”), a divorced fiftyish artist, is attractive, urbane, and highly intelligent but her relationships seem to have a built-in mechanism for self destruction. The men in Isabelle’s life offer her little except…
