Violette (France, 2013) – Violette Leduc was an acclaimed and controversial French author who, encouraged by Simone de Beauvoir, began writing after World War II and earned the respect of such literary greats as Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre for her frank and vivid memoirs. She wrote about female sexuality at a time when no […]
Anthropoid (2016) isn’t the first film to dramatize the real-life operation to assassinate SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution and Hitler’s third in command in the Nazi hierarchy. That honor belongs to Fritz Lang, who made the highly fictionalized and highly charged Hangmen Also Die in 1943, barely a year after the […]
Hugo (2011), Martin Scorsese’s first family film (it’s PG!) and his first engagement with 3D, is a love letter to the magic of cinema. Based on the novel by Brian Selznick, it is a tribute to early film pioneer George Méliès (played by Ben Kinsgley), a child’s adventure through a grown-up world of loss and […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Avengers: Endgame (2019, PG-13) brings practically every superhero of the Marvel big screen universe together to save the universe and bring the second phase of the interconnected stories to a close. It’s now the […]
Das Boot (Germany/France, 2019) shares the same title as Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 film (and is technically a sequel), but familiarity with the original is unnecessary to start the series. Also based on the novel Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim as well its sequel Die Festung, the 2019 series is set in late 1942, nine months after the film’s finale, […]
Steven Soderbergh’s Che (2008) is both two features and one work, a 4 ½-hour production that carves out what Soderbergh, producer/star Benicio Del Toro, and screenwriter Peter Buchman see as the two defining periods in the life of Ernesto Che Guevara: the Cuban Revolution and the Bolivian expedition. Except for a brief scene where Guevara […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … HBO celebrates the 50th anniversary of the moon landing with two award-winning programs. Ryan Gosling is astronaut Neil Armstrong in the Oscar-winning First Man (2018, PG-13), an intimate look at the story behind the […]
The history of the American space race is presented in terms both reverential and mortal in From the Earth to the Moon(1998), the sweeping Tom Hanks produced mini-series made for HBO. The debut episode “Can We Do This?,” directed by Hanks, is a quick survey of the birth of the space program from behind the […]
Eric Rohmer’s unique retelling of the tale of Perceval (France, 1978) is a great and glorious anomaly in the career of the nouvelle vague filmmaker. Adapted by Rohmer from the 12th century book by Cretien de Troyes, it’s a strange, sophisticated mix of ancient theater, medieval painting, music and prose in a beautifully stylized film […]
Burning Bush (2013), Agnieszka Holland’s almost four-hour political thriller, tackles one of the most harrowing events of Czech social history: On January 6, 1969, college student Jan Palach doused himself in gasoline and lit himself afire in downtown Prague to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Originally created as a three-part cable film for HBO […]
