Youth
Youth is the latest claptrap from director Paolo Sorrentino. I’m sorry, we’re already off to a bad start. Would “pretentious nonsense” be more charitable? This is the filmmaker’s followup to The Great Beauty, the Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film of 2013. I tolerated that picture. It was gorgeously photographed but its lack of […]
The Danish Girl
The Danish Girl is a partially fictionalized biography about the very real Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of gender reassignment surgery. The account imagines the experience of Einar Wegener, a man living in Europe who underwent a series of procedures from 1930–1931. It is based on a 2000 novel by American writer […]
The Night Before
Lazy, haphazard comedy tries to combine stoner movie with Christmas. If you’re already snickering at that idea then you might find this amusing. Everyone else would be wise to skip this lump of coal. Still curious? Well, here’s the “plot”. Every year Isaac (Seth Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) have taken their best buddy, Ethan […]
Carol
The story is simple. Carol details a relationship in the 1950s. In this case, between Carol Aird, an elegant society woman who resides in the upscale suburbs of New Jersey and a struggling young salesgirl named Therese Belivet who works in a Manhattan department store. Carol is going through a difficult divorce while trying to […]
Creed
Before this picture, the need for another “Rocky” movie was right up there with the urgency for another Friday the 13th installment. Creed is the latest entry in the franchise following 2006’s Rocky Balboa. The series stopped using numbers after Rocky V because well it’s more classy I suppose. This is the first Rocky movie […]
Spotlight
The difference between when a story explodes in the media and the time it actually happens, can be two totally different things. Just ask Bill Cosby. Such is the case with the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. On January 6, 2002 the Boston Globe ran the first of many reports detailing […]
The Peanuts Movie
The Peanuts characters have been animated before, but never quite like this. Charles Schultz’ creations debuted as a comic strip way back in 1950 and ran for 50 years until 2000. It continued on in reruns. During those years Peanuts expanded on its success with television specials. A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great […]
Beasts of No Nation
War is hell. The idea has been promoted before and here it is presented once again. This time through a series harrowing images that remain in the mind’s eye well after this combat film is over. The tale concerns Agu (Abraham Attah), a young West African boy affected by an unnamed civil war raging in […]
Suffragette
You’d think a period piece concerning the women’s suffragette movement in the U.K. would be an uplifting slam dunk. I mean championing a women’s right to vote is not exactly a controversial notion unless, according to the movie’s closing credits, you’re Saudi Arabia. It’s the kind of accessible femininism that everybody can get behind. Unfortunately […]
The Walk
The tale was famously told onscreen once before in James Marsh’s Man on Wire, an Oscar winner in 2009 for Best Documentary Feature. On the early morning of August 7, 1974, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He completed the death-defying stunt 1,350-feet above […]