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…
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…
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…
With a CRACK! that delivers aural and narrative impact, Red Sparrow lays out its cards early on. This CRACK! occurs during a ballet and highlights a key tension of such a performance — any mistake can be disastrous. In this case, the incident involving the CRACK! does prove devastating and foreshadows the ruin to come….
Interestingly Death Wish, the millennial-era remake of the gritty mid 70’s crime thriller of the same name, notoriously arrives in theaters at an increasingly awkward moment in a divisive national climate (particularly in the aftermath of the most recent high school shooting) where the political stakes regarding gun violence in America are at an all-time…
It is fitting that there are two competing readings of François Ozon’s Double Lover. The film dually presents as a highly stylized, seductively sleek French psychosexual thriller and this “I Know Who Killed Me”-esque overtly overly symbolic camp. Not wanting to assign one dominance over the other or perhaps unable to distinguish between apparent equals,…
Despite being a relatively well-made, exceedingly well-acted film, Submission has a litany of significant and fundamental flaws that simply cannot be ignored. Written and directed by Richard Levine, the film is based on Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel, and tells the tale of Ted Swenson (Stanley Tucci, “Transformers: Age of Extinction”), an author and creative…
