War is a tempestuous beast. It brings out the heroics and the horrors of our species known as humanity. It brings out the guile and the cunning and the romance, oh the romance. It's also been documented ad nauseum. It's safe to say that Roland Emmerich of "Independence Day" fame doesn't tread any new water [...]
One might take notice of “Motherless Brooklyn,” Edward Norton’s latest film, and react with disdain to its title. Don’t. The title of the film is as subtly complex as the characters who populate this noir, adapted by Norton from Jonathan Lethem’s novel. Norton plays Lionel Essrog, a private detective investigating the murder of his mentor [...]
If we take the proverbial meaning of a lighthouse, it is a structure meant to warn of dangerous coastlines for navigation and mark safe entries into harbors. Modern day electronic navigation systems have seen the decline of the lighthouse. In the 1800’s as is the setting for Robert Eggers’s “The Lighthouse,” they were prevalent and [...]
To be successful, a film not only needs to challenge intellect; it must challenge conventional wisdom, the thought that film must be a certain shape. In the 1970’s film convention was none-too-subtly challenged with the emergence of Blacksploitation films, starting with 1971's “Shaft,” “Coffy,” and “Cleopatra Jones” were marketed toward urban African-American audiences, but reached [...]
The road to releasing a major motion picture is a tough one. Regardless of whether it is shown in a theater or online, whether it is an action-spectacle or a hard-hitting drama, no film that I can remember from recent history has had more of an uphill climb to reach an audience than Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s [...]
Joachim Rønning returns to the Disney fold with "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil," featuring Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning and Michelle Pfeiffer. The film is not memorable. I stared at a blank, white page on my computer for a great, long while as I started to think about how to open my review of “Maleficent: Mistress of [...]
When I heard the song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” as a kid, I always thought the Beatles were saying “Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds.” As the laughter of that admission subsides, and with my profound apologies to Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney, it occurs to me that my hearing problem applies quite aptly [...]
There’s a pivotal point in my cinematic history where a film, “Enemy of the State” so engaged me and disengaged me that I love to hate it. There’s a 1970’s level of paranoia in that film which intrigued me along with the use of technology to move the story forward. And then there’s Will Smith, [...]
Sometimes, the title of a film says everything about the story. A title like “The Death of Dick Long” says, to me at least, that we’re in for a rambunctious time of debauchery as dark secrets are exposed. In the case of “The Death of Dick Long,” director Daniel Scheinert is the story of a [...]
Following Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828, New York Senator William L. Marcy uttered the phrase, “To the victor belongs the spoils.” While the meaning behind Marcy’s phrase is straightforward, it can also be applied to Doug Liman’s engrossing American Made, a triptych around South America. The Reagan Administration’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair in the [...]
