Screen
Badly thought out film adaptations, nevermore
Edgar Allan Poe introduced his 1840s readership to a new kind of fiction: detective novels. In his dark, twisted and often macabre stories, criminals committed crimes and were brought to justice by an officer of the law. But while his stories, including "The Cask of ...
‘Nothing to do with death, everything to do with life’
How do you sum up a life in 500 words? That’s the problem Bruce Weber, veteran obituary writer for the New York Times, faces...
An international state of mind
We are living in a golden age of cinema. You might not agree if your focus is solely on multiplexes infected with sequilities and...
Reel to reel | Week of December 12, 2013
All is Lost Robert Redford is brilliant in his role as a nameless man who must survive after his sailboat sinks leaving him lost at sea. Rated PG-13. At Colony Square. The Armstrong Lie In 2008, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (We Steal Secrets: The ...
Hugh catch a predator?
If you like smiling and aren’t criminally demented, Prisoners is a damn rough watch. Stuffed to the gills with child abduction, overmedicated depression and familial implosions, director Denis Villeneuve’s bloated whodunit is a puppy suicide away from the most ...
Passing jerks
Reduced to butt-baring eye candy, Passengers feels like Chris Pratt was made to do a Game of Thrones-esque “Walk of Shame.” What’s that, Chris?...
Awful, not full of awe
Preposterous, pseudointellectual, poorly constructed, clichéd, impenetrably masculine, goofy and possessed of an indecipherable ending, Interstellar is the mother of all misfires. It is a bloated juggernaut of stupidity, rolling its obese body stuffed with ...
A woman’s place in cinema
There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman
cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no...
Something to do with death
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will...
Untamed adolescence
Once upon a time, there were five beautiful Turkish sisters whose parents died when they were very young. As a result, they were sent...
An embarrassment of riches
Every year is a great year for the movies, but when was the best? Was it 1939, the year Hollywood gave us The Wizard...
