With Sam Rockwell voicing the title role of a 400-pound silverback gorilla and fellow Oscar winner Angelina Jolie joining the fun as an elephant named Stella, this CGI/live-action combo sounds like a raucous good time for kids of all ages. Right? Only it isn’t raucous…not really. Based on Katherine Applegate’s …
Read More »
It’s closing time for the Roaring 20s. As in, a permanent, fare-thee-well closing time: The Las Vegas cocktail lounge, located both miles and worlds away from the glitzy hotels and amusement-park casinos dotting the strip, has been sold off. So the joint’s longtime customers plan on celebrating in style. Michael, …
Read More »
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is anything but coincidental in Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso; short of giving the protagonist (“hero” might be pushing it) the same name as the Bad Lieutenant director, the connection between Willem Dafoe‘s wiry, wound-up cineaste in front of the camera and the living …
Read More »
How are vampires dealing with social distancing? They’re probably immune to COVID-19, but they also depend on a ready supply of human blood to keep going. Between quarantine and curfew, there aren’t a lot of us out and about after the sun goes down. This was the first thought I …
Read More »
When Philip Roth published The Plot Against America in 2004 — an alternate history where pilot Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 on an antiwar and barely veiled anti-Semitic platform — George W. Bush was nearing re-election and NBC was debuting the second season of The Apprentice, a game …
Read More »
What a kick to watch whip-smart director Rian Johnson shake the cobwebs off the whodunit genre and make it snap to stylish, wickedly entertaining life for a new generation. That’s what happens in Knives Out, a mystery that takes the piss out of Agatha Christie clichés. Johnson has experience with …
Read More »
It always began and ended with the shoes. Specifically, the 1,220 pairs of pumps that were found in the closet of Imelda Marcos, when she and her husband Ferdinand Marcos were forced to flee the country in 1986. It made the Philippines’ former First Lady the punchline of late-night talk …
Read More »
The year is 1880. Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch), future inventor of many great things and already a whiz at self-promotion, has brought a group of finely dressed, top-hatted businessman by train to a field in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Then, upon their exit, he shows them what he’s just patented: …
Read More »
When people talk about film as product instead of, say, art or entertainment, they’re referring to movies like Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. This misbegotten sequel to 2014’s not-so-hot Maleficent is a torturous exercise in brightly-colored monotony that chokes on repetitive screenwriting, amateurish directing, paycheck performances and digital hardware for a …
Read More »
For the first time, the man who laughs gets the star spot all to himself. No going 50-50 with the Caped Crusader, like Jack Nicholson did in Batman; even the late, great Heath Ledger’s Oscar for The Dark Knight was for Best Supporting Actor. In Joker, Joaquin Phoenix digs into …
Read More »