What is the cost to become beautiful? To be considered beautiful? Deep(ish) questions like that usually reside in dramas, but they can also be thoughtfully explored in comedies. It is this subject (among others like friendship and self-worth) that comedian and actress Amy Schumer tackles in her new film, I Feel Pretty. Although she stumbled…
Not since “The Electric Horseman” in 1979 have we had the distinct pleasure of seeing two outstanding actors, Robert Redford (“All Is Lost”), now 81, and Jane Fonda (“Youth”), now 79, working together in the same film. That situation has now changed with the release of Our Souls at Night, directed by Ritesh Batra whose…
Thoroughbreds has completely reinvented the concept of a haunted mansion, having mercifully put the former out to pasture and out of its misery. This particular mansion is home to Lily, a polished upper-class teenager with a fancy boarding school on her transcript, a coveted internship on her resume, and a penchant for short shorts and…
Many people can relate, and even confess, to being unmotivated in life. When ambition has disappeared and all our fears of rejection and failure become all too realistic, we retreat into what is comfortable. For once promising chef, twenty-something-year-old Charlie Brenner (spectacularly portrayed by Freddie Highmore, “The Art of Getting By”), this common feeling of…
Based “mostly” on a true story (in other words, fictional), Stephen Frears’ (“Florence Foster Jenkins”) Victoria and Abdul is an ode to the warmth of simple friendship and the wonders of British colonialism. Based on the book by Shrabani Basu with a screenplay by Lee Hall (“War Horse”), it is an engaging film about the…
Like a lonely, mysterious gunslinger from the Old West, a tall, slender rugged-looking man with a thick mustache comes to a small Bulgarian village near the Grecian border as part of a German work crew in Valeska Grisebach’s (“Longing”) Western. The man is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), in Bulgaria to work on a hydroelectric power station…
In 2016, the Freedom in the World report named Tibet as one of the most repressed countries in the world. Since China occupied Tibet over sixty years ago, hundreds of thousands of people have been tortured and imprisoned. Although the political conflict between China and Tibet plays a part, Moon Chang-Yong and Jin Jeon’s documentary…
