Plus ‘The Velvet Underground’ on Hulu, ‘The Trip’ on Netflix, ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ series on Amazon, ‘Free Guy’ and ‘The Green Knight’ on VOD and more…
Category: inspired by a true story
Steven Spielberg’s ‘Empire of the Sun’ – Innocence in wartime on HBO Max
Christian Bale made his film debut as British schoolboy in a Japanese prison camp in World War II Shanghai in this superb war drama.
‘School of Rock’ on Netflix and Paramount+
A manic Jack Black plays a narcissistic rock god wannabe who inspired a bunch of elementary school kids to rock out in the comedy directed by Richard Linklater.
‘I’m Not There’ – the lives of Bob Dylan on Amazon Prime
Todd Haynes draws from the songs, lives (real and imagined) and mysteries of Bob Dylan for his impressionistic survey of the artist, his art, his interaction (and at times collision) with the culture he both grabs onto and flees, and the mysteries that surround him.
Charlton Heston in the battle of ‘Khartoum’ on Amazon Prime
Laurence Olivier is unfortunately cast as an Arab (complete with heavy brownface makeup) in this sweeping epic of colonial war in 1880 Sudan.
Paul Muni is ‘Scarface’ in the original gangster masterpiece on Criterion Channel
The original Scarface (1932), loosely but boldly based on the notorious life and legend of Al Capone, didn’t invent the modern American gangster film. It blew it up. Films like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar had whetted the American moviegoing appetite for crime movies that reveled in vicarious thrills before delivering a sentence of […]
Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Terminal’ on Amazon Prime
Tom Hanks winds up in the longest airport layover in the history of mankind in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004). He plays Viktor Navorsky, a traveler from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozhia that, as fate would have it, dissolves between the time he boards his flight in Europe and arrives at JFK in […]