Paul Schrader spent decades of exploring the scarred psyches of American men who succumb to violence when pain overcomes reason, but nowhere as poignantly and powerfully as in Affliction (1997), his adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel. Affliction stars Nick Nolte as Wade Whitehouse, an unambitious, jocular small town sheriff and odd job man to a […]
Red Oaks: Season 1, an Amazon original series created by Gregory Jacobs (director of Magic Mike XXL and longtime Steven Soderbergh producer) and Joe Gangemi, is a half-hour coming of age comedy set in the eighties as high school buddies have one last summer blow-out before college. Craig Roberts is our lead with a bright future. […]
Amazon Prime Video announced a new exclusive offering for the month of October: the entire Back to the Future trilogy will be available to all Prime members for the 31 days of October. The timing is no coincidence: in Back to the Future II, Marty and Doc Brown travel to the far flung future of October 21, […]
In the early 2000s, an urban legend circulated about a young Japanese woman who watched film Fargo and travelled to Minnesota to search for the treasure buried in the snow. Filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner turned that apocryphal story into Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2014), a deft, a sweetly offbeat indie drama starring Rinko Kikuchi […]
Hand of God, starring Ron Perlman as a corrupt judge who starts to believe he’s receiving instructions from God as he searches for the man who raped his daughter, joins the growing slate of Amazon Original Series. The series co-stars Dana Delany as his wife and Garret Dillahunt as an ex-con eager for redemption who […]
Hombre (1967), adapted from the novel by Elmore Leonard, plays as a ruthless, revisionist take on Stagecoach. Paul Newman is the blue eyed “savage,” a white man raised by the Indians who rejects so-called civilized society for his spiritual family, who has chosen to go native rather than live in the lies and corruption of […]
This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, a natural disaster compounded by insufficient defenses and a disastrous response by the government. Looking for a proper way to mark the occasion? Amazon Prime and HBO subscribers have two very good options. Treme, David Simon’s follow-up to The Wire, is beautifully […]
Grantchester, set in a picturesque village near Cambridge in the early 1950s, looks at first glance to be another easy-going British mystery series in the Midsomer Murders vein. It’s based on a novel by James Runcie about an amiable, slightly eccentric Anglican priest who teams up with a Cambridge police detective to solve murders in […]
Shaun Evans stars in the British TV prequel to the long-running Inspector Morse mystery series, playing the young Morse when he was but a young Detective Constable who reluctantly returns to Oxford for a case that changes the course of his career. This production is “written and devised by” Russell Lewis, who takes the character […]
Amazon Pilot Season again, though this one is limited to just two hopefuls: Sneaky Pete, created by David Shore (House, M.D.), and Casanova, the first small-screen series from filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie). Sneaky Pete stars Giovanni Ribisi as a con man and an ex-convict who ducks a debt by appropriating the identity of his old […]
