Movie Reviews
The legendary and ever-personal Pedro Almodóvar makes his English-language debut after 44 years of feature filmmaking with The Room Next Door, a story almost tailor-made for him. His films have a distinctive way of presenting facets of life from a different perspective, and this film has the bonus of having a two-hander cast of Tilda […]
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The beauty and simplicity of the horror tale The Damned lie in its uncomplicated conceit of the invasion of an isolated space. Many films like this have come before, and others will come after, but director Thordur Palsson – working from a lean yet powerful script by Jamie Hannigan – makes a brilliant entry into […]
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Available at Christopher Titus’ website. Full disclosure: I have seen this show live three times, from its infancy when it was called Stories I Shouldn’t Tell, where Christopher Titus was working off sheets of paper on a barstool, to its finished form under a new title: Carrying Monsters. Filmed this year at the El Portal Theatre […]
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Going willingly into You Are Not Me (original Spanish title: Tú no eres yo) is to jump straight into a basket of tension that never empties, right from the opening airport scene to the final cut to black. But you’re also signing up to stay in that basket with few chances of reprieve or payoff, as writers/directors […]
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Moana 2 is what happens when you love the idea of something but forget what made it special and meaningful. Where Moana eagerly reached out to you and made sure your hand was clutched before running away on an adventure of self-discovery, Moana 2 takes us on an odyssey into myth and legend without bothering […]
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Confession time. Let me start by saying that I have never had the opportunity to: 1) Read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. 2) See Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical stage adaptation of this novel. 3) Listen to a single recording of said musical. This review […]
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Here’s what you need to know going into Red One: It’s a Christmas movie written by Chris Morgan – scribe of the third through seventh Fast & Furious movies (and the Hobbs & Shaw spinoff) – and directed by Jake Kasdan, director of the latest Jumanji movies (and one of my personal favorites, Zero Effect). […]
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Anna Kendrick’s solid directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, is a tough, uncomfortable examination of patriarchal misogyny and sexism through the lens of actor Cheryl Bradshaw’s brief time in Hollywood. Looking for any kind of professional break, Bradshaw went on The Dating Game in 1978 and unexpectedly matched with contestant Rodney Alcala. For those who […]
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“I live in the weak and the wounded… Doc.” — Mary Hobbes This quote from Brad Anderson’s criminally underseen and underappreciated Session 9 kept coming to me throughout my viewing of Smile 2. I could almost hear Jurian Hughes’ eerily disjointed voice winding its way through my mind, especially considering the themes of trauma that […]
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Hunting Daze : Movie Review
One does not just sit down to take writer/director Annick Blanc’s feature debut Hunting Daze (original title: Jour de chasse) as just another movie; it is truly a bewildering, unsettling, angering, at times distasteful, and utterly beguiling experience. There’s no artifice, no gussying it up; what Blanc wants to show us in the little microcosm […]
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