Lives online, lives offline. Activities that only happen because web cameras connect us to an anonymous multitude. What happens online may stay online, or overlap with the “real world.” What happens when a person is one thing on the Internet and another in the outside world? The questions around such alternative lives are pressing concerns…
The Rider is an unflinching tribute (and one that made me flinch) to those who fully inhabit the present and “live their lives 8 seconds at a time.” It’s this short term thinking that renders it impossible for rider Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) to dream of a life beyond those series of seconds at the…
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…
There are many variables transpiring in the gritty, yet grating, urban crime flick Proud Mary that want desperately to embrace themes of unconventional motherly instincts and clichéd street-wise mayhem. Unfortunately for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” Oscar-nominated star Taraji P. Henson (who also has an executive producing credit for this lopsided actioner), her labored…
Somber, unrelenting and ultimately life-affirming, A Fantastic Woman is a powerful portrait of Marina Vidal, an eponymous woman and transgender character played fantastically by transgender actress Daniela Vega (“The Guest”), who must navigate institutional and individual intolerance and discrimination when her lover, Orlando (Francisco Reyes, “Neruda”), dies unexpectedly. The circumstances surrounding Orlando’s sudden death raise…
With Venom it’s Tom Hardy’s turn to get in on the comic book movie craze. In it, he takes a turn as Eddie Brock (please forget when Topher Grace had a turn in “Spider-Man 3”), a down on his luck journalist. But as luck would have it, his weakened mental state makes him a perfect…
In 1973, if any 16-year-old boy were to be kidnapped on the streets of Rome, it might warrant a brief mention in the papers. If the boys’ last name was Getty, however, it would be a major story followed closely throughout the world. Written by David Scarpa and based on John Pearson’s book “Painfully Rich:…
