Killing Eve: Season 1 (2018), BBC America’s clever, compelling, mordantly funny spy thriller, is the network’s first must-see original series since Orphan Black and is even more fun. Sandra Oh earned an Emmy nomination for her performance as Eve Polastri, a low-level security agent for MI-5 who has traced a series of unsolved assassination to […]
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 … Sandra Oh is a bored, whipsmart MI-5 agent assigned to track down a brilliant, unpredictable Russian assassin (scene stealer Jodie Comer) in Killing Eve (2018, PG-14), a clever, compelling, mordantly funny […]
Enter the Dragon (1973) – After years of supporting roles in Hollywood, American citizen Bruce Lee became a star in Hong Kong with a handful of hard-edged martial arts thrillers. He returned to conquer his adopted homeland with this American/Hong Kong co-production, a glorified B-movie mix of kung-fu fighting (choreographed by Lee himself) and James […]
Boogie Nights (1997), the sophomore feature from Paul Thomas Anderson, is a surprisingly vibrant, funny, and at times quite warm story of a dysfunctional filmmaking family in the adult film industry of the late 1970s. Partially inspired by the life of porno star John Holmes, it stars Burt Reynolds as a quiet but firm director […]
Ex Machina (2014) plays the man-vs.-machine story as a chamber drama. Domhnall Gleeson is the socially naïve computer programmer Caleb who wins a company contest to spend a weekend in the private retreat of visionary company CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a software genius who can’t wait to show Caleb his new project: a sophisticated artificial intelligence […]
Rolling Stone once called The Big Lebowski (1998) “the most worshipped comedy of its generation.” I like to think of it as the Book of Duderonomy, the lost gospel of the post-modern Testament. Jeff Bridges is brilliant as the Dude, one of the most strangely centered individuals in the movies. This bowler/stoner/free spirit is mistaken […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, Showtime Anytime, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Alice Rohrwacher won the screenwriting prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Happy as Lazzaro (Italy, 2018, PG-13, with subtitles), a modern parable of a holy innocent (first-time actor Adriano Tardiolo) that […]
A rare screen adaptation of a beloved novel to maintain the emotional and dramatic power of the original while establishing its own distinctive approach to the story, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is an underdog masterpiece. “It was a classic story: the story of an individual fighting the system,” is how producer Michael […]
John Boorman had only one feature to his credit, the rock and roll lark Catch Us If You Can with the Dave Clark Five, when he came to Hollywood to direct the one-of-kind thriller Point Blank (1967). Boorman’s film, based on Richard Stark’s novel “The Hunter,” shuffles the story of a gunman named Walker (Lee […]
Lifetime Channel original series The Witches of East End (2013-2014) is not a remake of The Witches of Eastwick, mind you (creator Maggie Friedman already tried that) but a femme-centered supernatural series centered on a family of witches beset by a curse. Joanna Beauchamp (Julia Ormond) is immortal and doomed to watch her two daughters […]
