In the film, Sweet Country, set in the bleak Northern Territory of Australia of the 1920s, there is a brief interchange between a hard-working, though weary and aging Archie (Gibson John), an Aboriginal cattle hand, and a wayward teenage Aboriginal Philomac (played by the twins, Tremayne and Trevan Doolan). Archie lectures the boy about their…
Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is nothing short of biblical for the pop culture enthusiast. More surprisingly, however, is the engaging narrative and even the likable cast of (young) characters. The expensive movie ran Warner Bros. $175 million, but Spielberg’s project does reap the benefits of that expense — with stellar CGI and a virtual…
Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and Israel’s submission to the 2018 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s (“Lebanon”) brilliant and confounding Foxtrot reveals itself less by narrative than by images: A narrow road in an empty stretch of desert, a lonely camel meandering through a…
Director/co-writer Matt Spicer intriguingly meshes together a sharply insightful confection of deranged, alienated millennium-era feminine empowerment tweaked with disturbing, quirky overtones. The skillful and sardonically executed dramedy Ingrid Goes West is a smart, satirical and blistering commentary on youthful loneliness tied in the murky web of social media deception and obsession. Vastly witty and perceptive,…
Performed at the Swan Theatre in July 1597, “The Isle of Dogs,” a satirical play (now lost) written by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson was labeled “seditious, slanderous, and lewd” by the government and led to the arrest of the actors (including Jonson) and the closing of all London theaters for months. The nature of…
It is a bold filmmaker who trusts film as film and allows the medium to communicate without recourse to exposition and dialogue. Such a filmmaker is Lynne Ramsey (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”), whose latest offering, You Were Never Really Here, is a brilliantly brutal assembly of image and sound that never displays any…
“Gantz” is a 37-volume manga series written and illustrated by Hiroya Oku from 2000-2013, whose worldwide distribution has sold an excess of over 20 million copies. Hallmarked by its sexual overtones and sadistically gory aesthetic in tandem with deep sociological, psychological and anthropological themes dissecting morality, it is considered one of the most controversial seinen…
