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Taxi
Our country may be creativity bankrupt, corrupt and venal when it comes to filmmaking, and its filmmakers marked as victims and chumps (Keaton, Welles, von Stroheim and other case studies). Those who...
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The Forbidden Room
The climactic moment of the 1963 Jerry Lewis film Who’s Minding the Store? features a turbo-charged vacuum cleaner inflated to Hindenburg-like proportions after sucking up the merchandise of a...
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Entertainment
Gregg Turkington’s alter ego, Neil Hamburger – “America’s funnyman” – is a seedy, scowling phantom, sporting a cheap suit and a greasy comb-over, grasping multiple glasses of booze and coughing up...
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45 Years
Charlotte Rampling’s icy steel gaze, sizes you up, takes you in and spits you back out. As a young woman – a sleek model and an even sleeker actress – Rampling was a motion picture glossy and her film...
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Where To Invade Next
When the words “Michael Moore” are uttered to right wing Republican zealots, their eyes glaze over and they lapse into paroxysms of rage and retribution, the equivalent of the burlesque shtick of...
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The Hateful Eight
In Quentin Tarantino’s epic talkfest The Hateful Eight, Samuel L. Jackson encapsulates the ethos of the film: “Let’s slow it down. Let’s slow it way down.” In this three-hour plus road show exhibition...
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Maggie’s Plan
Woody Allen may have retreated to nostalgia but the Woody Allen films of the 1980s (Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors) of self-absorbed intellectual New Yorkers stalking the...
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20th Century Women
James Stewart once told Peter Bogdanovich that films were “pieces of time.” Neither past, nor future, film is ever-present. In Mike Mills’s new film 20th Century Women, the scenes play like permanent...
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The Space Between Us
As Stan Laurel once declared in Sons of the Desert, “Life’s not short enough.” The Space Between Us is a Disney Channel heart-beater between teens masquerading as a science fiction epic, hitting all...
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Dying Laughing
In this new Trump era of a Dice Clay President and bully pulpit bull, standup comedy has more relevancy than ever, at least in terms of political discourse and people interested in a greater...
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After the Storm
At one point in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After the Storm a character remarks, “We’re having too many typhoons this year” and by that point in the film you know that the character is referring to more than a...
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The Death of Louis XIV
So far the best film of 2017 concerns the dying, rotting carcass of the French Sun King and the most suspenseful moment in the film is when the king manages to digest a cracker. Director and co-writer...
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Home Sweet Hell
When Knocked Up was released in 2007, it was clear that one cast member would skyrocket to fame with Knocked Up as a springboard to superstardom. But with much blood under the bridge since that time,...
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The Gunman
Laurence Olivier (nominated for an Oscar nine times and winning once), played towering roles – Othello, Hamlet, Henry V, Richard III. But in 1965, right after career defining roles in The Entertainer...
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The D Train
The D Train, the creepy new dramedy with Jack Black, is a journey to the end of the line, the ultimate Seth Rogen-James Franco bromance film taken to its logical conclusion. This Is the End unfurled...
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Maggie
A grieving father expresses a wish to the family concerning his terminally ill teenager – “Let’s enjoy the time we have with her.” But this is not Lorenzo’s Oil and the child is not suffering from ADL....
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Love At First Fight
Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan wrote, “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” In Thomas Cailley’s pathetically titled Love at First Fight, a dumbed-down English translation of the...
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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
In Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, the phrase “I’m happy to hear you are doing fine” becomes the one spark of emotion and the mantra uttered by a succession of...
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The Overnight
In the Woody Allen film Sleeper, a scientist informs Allen that his brain will be electronically simplified and Allen responds, “My brain? That’s my second favorite organ.” In defense of Woody Allen,...
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The Stanford Prison Experiment
For a college student in the ‘80s and ‘90s who took Psychology 101 classes, one of the key moments of the semester was in studying the groundbreaking psychological experiments in social control and...
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