Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand Melissa McCarthy is The Boss, a disgraced financial titan who turns a youth cookie drive into a hardball sales campaign. The R-rated comedy is available in an unrated version. Also on DVD and Blu-ray and at Redbox. Sing Street, from filmmaker John Carney (Once), tells an age-old story: boy meets girl, boy […]
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) gave Roger Corman, the director-producer who earned the nickname “King of the Bs,” the biggest budget of his career to date. After more than 40 films, most of them for the budget-challenged AIP, he was hired by 20th Century Fox and given the resources of their studio, casting department, […]
Set in the Union-occupied city of Alexandria in the Confederate state of Virginia in the midst of the American Civil War, Mercy Street (2016) explores the conflicts between North and South through the uneasy interactions between the occupying Union forces and Northern doctors at a Union army hospital. Set up in what had been the […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the most bombastic and least self-aware superhero picture to date, pits the Dark Knight (Ben Affleck as an aging, rather bitter Batman) against the Man of Steel (Henry Cavill) with Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) pulling the strings of the smackdown. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) also gets […]
Don’t Look Now (1973), Nicolas Roeg’s mosaic of a thriller, remains a mystery to the end. Set largely in Venice, where the labyrinth of canals and tunnels creates a claustrophobic maze, it’s less about the elliptical story (adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s short tale) than the texture of loss, obsession, and emotional remove. Donald Sutherland […]
The signature image of Gomorrah (Italy, 2008), Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Robert Saviano’s book about the dominance of organized crime in Naples and Caserta, is a pair of teenage boys running around a deserted beach in their underwear while shooting off automatic weapons. That’s as much glamour as you can expect from this portrait of […]
The Last Panthers (2015) are the final incarnation of the infamous international network of jewel thieves formed by criminals and soldiers of fortune from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The Pink Panthers are indeed real but this TV mini-series is fiction, a sprawling story that opens on a jewel heist in the French port […]
Winona Ryder stars in Stranger Things: Season 1, the Netflix original series about strange, supernatural doings in suburban America, circa 1983. It channels the kid-centered adventures of the era, like E.T. and The Goonies, but with a darker tone. “There’s a sweet kind of sadness running just underneath all that period detail, a longing for […]
The Last Kingdom: Season 1 (2015), based on the first two novels in Bernard Cornwell’s “The Saxon Stories” series of historical novels, retells the story of King Alfred the Great, the ninth century Saxon King of Wessex, through the eyes of Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Alexander Dreymon). Born a Saxon but captured and raised by a Danish […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand I Saw the Light stars Tom Hiddleston as country-western legend Hank Williams in the story of his rise to fame and spiral of self-destruction. Elizabeth Olsen and Bradley Whitford co-star. R. Also on DVD and Blu-ray and at Redbox. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Pitt are a married couple in crisis in […]
