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 … A Star Is Born (2018, R), Bradley Cooper’s latest remake of the Hollywood classic with Lady Gaga in the starring role, earned eight Academy Award nominations. You can catch up with […]
Dazed and Confused (1993) – Cinema has the unique ability to create a sensory experience vivid enough to make the past suddenly present and alive. Richard Linklater’s cinematic flashback Dazed and Confused captures a rich pageant of high-school life, circa 1976, in a mere 100 minutes, leaning on nostalgia without wallowing in it. Jason London […]
Created for Canadian TV by Chis Haddock, Intelligence: Complete Series (2006-2007) is a smarter and more sophisticated crime drama than the American counterparts of its era, cleverer in its tangle of narratives and less showy in its visual style. Set in Vancouver, B.C., a central hub for shipping between Canada, the U.S., Asia, and points […]
Steve Carrell is a sweet, shy middle-aged geek and the last American virgin in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), the feature debut of director Judd Apatow (who wrote the film with Carrell), an oddly sweet mix of romantic comedy and adolescent shenanigans, albeit with a slightly older cast. When he’s pulled out of the stock room […]
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 … Bohemian Rhapsody (2018, PG-13) has been criticized for its simplistic (and in some places inaccurate) portrait of the life of singer and Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, but it is a rousing, […]
You could collect the films of Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso under the title “Into the Wild.” His characters go out of the cities and into the wilderness or the isolated backcountry, and characters who leaves the constraints of society for the primal or the internal. Jauja (2014), pronounced “How-ha,” is both: an odyssey into the […]
The Academy Awards will be handed out on Sunday, February 24. Are you caught up on the major nominees? Eight films made the cut in the category of best picture and a few of them are still in theaters, notably the offbeat royal drama The Favourite (2018, R), which came away with ten nominations, political […]
After three underwhelming sequels to James Cameron’s hard-wired hardware time travel thriller The Terminator (1984) in the past dozen years, it’s time to remind ourselves just how tight and clever and entertaining the original film was. Made for a mere $6 million and released in the fall of 1984 by a small independent sudio to instant […]
There are two kinds of people, my friend. Those who love Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and those who resist the machismo and gallows humor of what is arguably the definitive spaghetti western. Leone’s first real attempt at mythologizing his vision of the American west (shot, of course, in the […]
A lovely film about regret, self-punishment and redemption on a scale both human and mythic (or at least American folkloric), Get Low (2009) is a feature film with the personality of a short story, filled with quietly offbeat characters and directed with a deft balance of comedy and tragedy. Which is why it had a […]
