If the title of the film Naked Singularity piques your interest, a brief investigation via your favorite search engine will reveal that it’s a term used in astrophysics to describe a theoretical phenomenon that may exist in black holes. But since this is a film review and not an entry for a layperson’s guide to…
Within the current world of digitally-released cinema, it can be easy to discover what are the treasures versus the trash. And somehow, within the span of only two minutes into Lionsgate’s latest production, Vanquish, I knew what I was looking at was easily the second category — the 2021 equivalent of discovering a mangled DVD…
Edoardo Ponti (“Coming & Going”) has provided his mother, the great Sophia Loren (“Nine”), with her ninety-eighth film credit and her first starring role in 16 years in The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé), a sincere if somewhat flawed look at the relationship between an orphaned Muslim boy from Senegal and an aging…
Beggars can’t be choosers during the global lock-down. Cinemas are closed, blockbuster movies and their smaller brethren delayed, and Netflix’s back catalogue has been squeezed drier than a tube of antibacterial hand gel. So when the streaming platform serves up a new release, written and produced by the all-conquering Russo brothers no less, audiences were…
With one co-directing credit under his belt (“Smoke Filled Lungs”), writer/director Jason Cabell begins his sophomore film with a surprising amount of confidence. Leading with intriguing, juxtaposing images of torture and partying aided by a smooth soundtrack-driven flow, the opening scene of his first solo-directed feature Running with the Devil teases a style generally uncommon…
The first of two John DeLorean-focused films to be released in 2019 (the other being a documentary/re-enactment hybrid “Framing John DeLorean”), Driven does not adopt the typical biopic template. Rather, it positions itself almost as an eyewitness perspective to the entire scandal from the point of view of the FBI informer who ratted John DeLorean…
When 38-year-old Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen, “The Disaster Artist”), a sloppy and unkempt-looking journalist, falls for Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron, “Tully”), a highly sophisticated, intelligent, and political savvy politician, we know that we must be in fantasyland or in a Jonathan Levine (“The Night Before”) comedy. While Levine’s Long Shot challenges believability, there are enough…
