Screen
‘Spy Next Door’ is limp and lifeless
"Every day you get older," Butch Cassidy once griped to The Sundance Kid. "It's the law...
The Disney ouroboros
It all started in Kansas City with a young dreamer named Walt Disney. Alice’s Wonderland wasn’t his first creation, but it was significant. The...
‘How nice it is not to be alone.’
The biggest surprise cinema held for me in 2021 came at the Telluride Film Festival with the U.S. premiere of The Power of the Dog,...
A portrait of the writers as young men
David Foster Wallace is an ordinary guy. He reads obsessively, eats junk food en masse, is addicted to watching TV, wonders what it is like when Alanis Morissette eats a bologna sandwich and lives his life with a nagging feeling of emptiness. Wallace self-diagnoses ...
Twenty feet from stardom, a million miles from sanity
Like most love stories, this one begins at the movies. London, 1971: A young actor goes to see the latest release, A Clockwork Orange,...
News-sploitation
Recently, CNN showed reporters physically chasing a woman connected to the Ebola scare. Not too long ago, a Fox News affiliate aired a suicide live on television. So, no, Nightcrawler isn’t farfetched. It’s perfectly fetched. It’s importantly fetched...
Powerful pandemic picture
One of the most powerful — and frightening — film themes is global pandemics. Diseases already seem to spread without us fully understanding or being able to control them, and rapidly evolve to become resistant to our defenses. It's not much of a leap to see a very ...
We’ve always been this dirty
Not unlike the year 2016 in politics, writer/director Dee Rees’ adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound, starts off as a slow, plodding look at...
Always on my mind
Some people are never more alone than they are in the company of others. Adam is such a person.
Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter...
Driven by fashion to mediocrity
Drive begins extremely well and ends in a muddle of ultra-violence, hypocrisy and stylistic preening, which won’t be any sort of deterrent for those who like its looks...
R2D2 meets the AARP
First things first: although she’s only eight years younger than he is, nobody will accept that Susan Sarandon would want to kiss Frank Langella on his mouth parts. That premise requires a bigger suspension of disbelief than the rest of Robot & Frank, which presumes ...
