You don’t need to be rich or Asian to enjoy this film, but it helps if you are crazy. Unless you sneaked aboard NASA’s InSight Lander, you may have heard that John M. Chu’s (“Now You See Me 2”) satirical Crazy Rich Asians is the first Hollywood film since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club” to…
Maine spends the first ten minutes immersing the viewers in its setting. There is no dialogue, just the picturesque Appalachian Trail, the sound of the wind, and a woman (Laia Costa, “Victoria”) going about her business, which involves peeing in the bushes and fiddling about with sanitary products. The immersion in nature and its elements…
Entertainment guru Tyler Perry plants his fingertips on yet another toothless comedic concoction that has more cockeyed misfires than Madea’s gun rack display. In Perry’s latest baseless romantic comedy Nobody’s Fool, more of the same formula applies; tiresome stereotypes accompanied by forced melodrama and transparent seeds of recycled zaniness. Clearly, it has been a reliable…
Outwardly unexpressive but inwardly volatile, Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in, “The Throne”), a young delivery man, aspires to be a writer but does not write. He asks himself, “What kind of story can I write?” but he is an outsider looking to the world to provide a story for him. “To me, the world is a mystery,”…
Write When You Get Work starts off with promise. The opening image is that of a young couple, rolling about on the beach, caught up in their own little sensual bubble. This is a good enough tease, where we are invited into their relationship but not bogged down with details, the movie excelling in the…
Fueled by over-prescription of highly addictive painkillers, two thirds of all drug overdose deaths reported in 2016 involved opioids. Though the film industry has been late in dramatizing the epidemic, several high profile films have been released this year on the subject including Peter Hedges’ powerful and moving Ben is Back, starring the director’s son,…
“I feel wherever I go, that tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here, and always too soon” — Speak Low, Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash Georg (Franz Rogowski, “Tiger Girl”), a Jewish radio and TV technician fleeing from persecution in Germany en route to Marseilles, waits in a dimly lit café in Paris for a friend…
