Ken Loach won the Palm d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival for I, Daniel Blake (2016), a classic Loach social commentary taking on the struggles of the working classes and underclasses let down by society. This one, about a 59-year-old carpenter and widower in Newcastle recovering from a heart attack while fighting for assistance, […]
The Big Night (1951), the final American film made by Joseph Losey before he fled Hollywood and the blacklist for Europe, has a title just generic enough to suggest anything from a musical extravaganza to a teen sex comedy. But vagueness aside, it’s really quite a provocative youth noir with John Drew Barrymore as an […]
Enchanted April (1991) – Josie Lawrence and Miranda Richardson are the two quietly miserable middle class wives who impulsively (and passionately) decide to escape their dreary world in post-World War I London and their distracted, pompous husbands and rent a castle on the Italian coast. When they wake up in their villa after a rainy […]
“There are angels over the streets of Berlin,” insists Wim Wenders in his lyrical fantasy Wings of Desire (Germany, 1987), but these are like no angels you’ve never seen. Bundled in dark overcoats, they watch over the city with ears open to the heartbeat of the human soul, listening to the internal musings and yearnings […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … A Quiet Place (2018, PG-13), starring Emily Blunt and John Krasinski (who also directs) as parents in the apocalypse, is a horror film with a high-concept premise (alien invaders hunt humans by sound) but behind […]
“To know me is to fly with me,” proclaims philosopher-in-flight Ryan Bingham. “This is where I live.” And it’s clear in the opening moments of Up in the Air (2009) as Ryan—as played by George Clooney—walks through the airport, perfectly at home as checks in to the preferred customer counter and eases through security with […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, Showtime Anytime, FilmStruck, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, R), Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Moonlight,” is the touching and powerful drama of a young African-American couple (KiKi Layne and Stephan James) in […]
Is there anything more dangerous than a true believer who approaches his mission with unshakable certainty and unwavering dogma? Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (Germany, 2006) follows the odyssey of a staunchly patriotic Stasi agent (a brilliant Ulrich Mühe), the secret police of the GDR (Communist East Germany), and his surveillance of […]
“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” GoodFellas (1990), Martin Scorsese’s violent, dynamic, exhilarating adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi’s non-fiction book Wiseguy, about real-life wiseguy-turned-witness against the mob Henry Hill, exploded across screens in 1990 and was embraced as the first great American gangster movie since Coppola’s The Godfather […]
Take the title at face value: Doubt (2008), directed and adapted for the screen by playwright John Patrick Shanley, does not offer answers. Rather, it challenges us to understand our own instincts to believe in the absence of proof. Sunny, optimistic idealist Sister James (Amy Adams), a young nun teaching history to junior high boys […]
