Jupiter Ascending (2015) was a player at the Razzie Awards, the snarky organization that puts the spotlight in the worst and most over-hyped films of the year. Not exactly the kind of attention you seek out as a filmmaker, and maybe not completely deserved, though that’s admittedly a minority opinion. This is old fashioned space […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Chris Evans plays an Israeli Mossad agent smuggling Ethiopian Jews from a Sudanese refugee camp to Israel through an abandoned seaside hotel in The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019, not rated), an Argo-like drama […]
Jackie Brown (1997) – “Amateurs borrow, professionals steal,” goes the maxim, and Quentin Tarantino steals like a pro. Where directors of the previous generation peppered their films with classic cinematic quotes, Tarantino plunders the films of his formative years for ideas—mostly B-movies and exploitation films about cars and capers and criminals—and riffs on them with […]
The Bank Job (2008) may sound like a generic crime vehicle from the title and the casting of genre action star Jason Statham, a stalwart tough guy with stocky presence and limited range, but don’t let that stop you from digging into this British film. Based on (or more accurately inspired by) the real life […]
The zombie comedy was hardly fresh territory when Zombieland (2009) came along (and really, will anyone top Shaun of the Dead?) but it nonetheless does a fine job of mining the humor inherent in the end of the world. Jesse Eisenberg is the loner college geek who finds that his obsessive-compulsive instincts are just what […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Netflix brings its signature original series to a close with the seventh and final season of Orange Is the New Black. Based on the memoir by Piper Kerman, renamed Piper Chapman and played by […]
Netflix continues to ramp up its original programming. August brings the fantasy epic Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which continues the story begun in the 1982 Jim Henson film, and the original movie comedies Otherhood with Patricia Arquette, Angela Bassett, and Felicity Huffman and Sextuplets with Marlon Wayans, and the original documentaries American Factory and […]
Is there another American filmmaker who takes such joy in telling stories and spinning cinematic spells as Quentin Tarantino? I don’t mean tackling big issues or making epic statements. I’m talking about the sheer pleasure of telling audiences a tale that takes them places they don’t expect and ways they haven’t quite experienced before. The […]
Taxi Driver (1976), Martin Scorsese’s incendiary masterpiece of alienation and anger and urban anxiety may be the most maverick vision of seventies American cinema. It is certainly one of the most visceral portraits of the American urban underbelly ever put on film, a movie bathed in blood as much as in light, and almost forty years […]
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 […]
