“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:…
A breathtaking fantastical journey through the height of Hollywood’s most reputable and rebellious era is simultaneously a justified and monotonous way to describe Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Seeing classic views of the golden age of Tinseltown through the lens of the enigmatic and sometimes overbearing filmmaker is shocking…
Zoë Kravitz’s (“Rough Night”) character in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Leta Lestrange, tells the franchise’s bashful hero, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, “The Danish Girl”), “You never met a monster you couldn’t love.” The line is actually quite interchangeable with the film itself. While the narrative is somewhat of a slog, there is just…
Half the fun of watching Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a prequel of sorts to the “Harry Potter” franchise, is trying to figure out just who will be a vital link to that amazingly popular film series. J.K. Rowling (the author of the original “Potter” books, as well as this screenplay) seeks, like,…
There is a sub-genre of the war film that focuses on those away from combat. These films do not display the horrors of warfare or the camaraderie of men under fire, but instead the dramas of those left behind or serving their country behind the lines. Such a film is Testament of Youth, based on…
Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s explosive, white-knuckle sci-fi instant classic is a wonder to behold, with devastatingly realistic effects as a backdrop to a terrifying, compelling story and terrific work by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. It is both a concrete what-if story and a mesmerizing existential mindbender. The U.S Space Shuttle Explorer is docked at the…
“No one can hear you scream in space.” That tagline (or something along those lines) belongs to another movie, but it also applies to Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming science-fiction thriller Gravity. It spotlights the life and death struggle of two astronauts — played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney — who are stuck in space after…
