Edie Falco stars as the tough, fiercely dedicated, and wickedly vindictive head nurse of a New York hospital emergency room in the darkly comic drama of addiction.
Category: !Featured
What to watch: ‘Training Day’ and more on Netflix, Amazon, and VOD
Training Day (2001) earned Denzel Washington an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as a corrupt narcotics cop. In part it’s because he’s playing against type: Denzel earned his reputation as Hollywood’s bedrock of decency and morality: his screen heroes fight fear, prejudice, and self-doubt for their goodness. Detective Alonzo Harris proved that the […]
‘Cell 211’ – Spanish prison thriller on Hulu
Cell 211 (2009), a volatile thriller from Spain about a young guard trapped in the midst of a prison riot, is already being looked by Hollywood for remake potential. Make a point of seeing the superb original, which is visceral and intelligent, with layers of political complexities (both national and internal) and personal complications, and […]
‘The Walk’ on VOD
The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the French aerialist who strung a tightwire between the Twin Towers and walked between the newly-constructed buildings in 1974, comes from Robert Zemeckis, a filmmaker who has pushed cinema technology to offer previously unseen sights and experiences. Here he uses digital effects to recreate not just the […]
‘Foyle’s War: Seasons 8 and 9’ on Netflix
Foyle’s War: Seasons 8 and 9 continues and, ultimately, concludes the acclaimed and beloved historical mystery series from Britain in the years after the end of World War II. Returning from a trip to the United States, the retired Inspector Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen) is recruited by British Intelligence for the new challenge: fighting the […]
Lost and Found: ‘Summer Children’ on Amazon Prime
With the news that the Vilmos Zsigmond, the great cinematographer of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deer Hunter, and many other defining American films of the seventies, passed away this week, I’ve revived this review of an early Zsigmond feature, a lost American indie from the sixties discovered early this century. Produced in […]
What to watch: new movies and TV shows for the new year
Happy 2016. Here are a few of the recent arrivals on Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the streaming and VOD services. Netflix Keira Knightley is the headstrong and feisty Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, the 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel of love, class and social convention. Matthew Macfadyen is the starchy […]
‘Les Bonnes Femmes’ on Amazon Prime
The “bonnes femmes” of Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) are four shopgirls at a small appliance store in Paris. Good time girl Bernadette Lafont spends her nights in empty flirtations with boorish womanizers, social climbing Lucile Saint-Simon withers under the disdainful gaze of her boyfriend’s haughty parents, seemingly confident Stephane Audran secretly follows her […]
What to watch: ‘Black Mirror: White Christmas’ is a cynical holiday special on Netflix
Don’t expect any holiday cheer from Black Mirror: White Christmas, a Christmas story from the dark British series about technology bringing out the worst human impulses. But if you are looking for a shot of cynicism to counter the seasonal spirit, this clever anthology of three stories with a science fiction twist should fit the […]
Santa, Rudolph, and Frosty: Beloved Christmas specials on Amazon Prime
For big kids of certain age, it wasn’t really Christmas until all those silly Christmas specials produced by Rankin& Bass, usually with stop motion animation that looked like toy rooms come to life but sometimes with more traditional hand-drawn animation, started showing up on prime time TV. Sure, A Charlie Brown Christmas and the original […]