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 […]
The new Netflix original series Narcos is a sprawling crime saga produced in Colombia by filmmaker José Padilha. It frames the story of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar with a classic gangster movie rise-and-fall format (Padilha cites GoodFellas as an inspiration) while exploring the political and social culture that gave rise to the drug cartels. It’s […]
Set in the Dakota Territory of 1879, The Burrowers (2008) is a monster movie grounded in a frontier sensibility. Set in the Dakota Territory of 1879, where survival is already a challenge, writer / director JT Petty brings a starkly unglamorized sensibility to life and mortality on the Dakota prairie: it opens with a boy […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand Little Boy, a family drama about a spunky little kid who turns to prayer to prove his faith while his father fights in World War II, comes from the producers of The Bible. The heart is in the right place but the message is confused and misguided and its origins (it’s produced […]
Lambert & Stamp are Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. There’s no reason you’d know their names unless you are steeped in the minutia of the sixties British rock scene. No, they’re not some forgotten rock duo, at least not as performers. While they didn’t create The Who, it would be fair to say they played […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand Hot Pursuit, an odd couple road comedy with Reese Witherspoon as a by-the-book cop trying to protect newly widowed drug dealer’s wife Sofía Vergara from both cops and crooks. It’s a pratfall action comedy that fails to catch any of the fire generated by Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy in the raunchy […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand The Divergent Series: Insurgent, the second film in yet another young adult series about our doomed future, is—like The Hunger Games—built on a strong young woman and a superb young actress (Shailene Woodley). But where The Hunger Games, another metaphor in the guise of a dystopian science fiction thriller, creates a complete […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand Helen Mirren stars in “Woman in Gold,” inspired by a true story of a Jewish woman who took the Austrian government to court to recover a painting looted from her family by the Nazis. The landmark case is simplified into an underdog drama with underdog good guys (Ryan Reynolds is her novice […]
Netflix doesn’t release anything like Nielson ratings of its shows but it’s safe to say that documentaries have been doing well for the service. based on how much they have devoted to bringing non-fiction to the catalog, and how competitive they’ve become with theatrical distributors. Netflix produced the award-winning documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” which […]
Wild Tales delivers on the promise of its title. An anthology of six original short stories from writer / director Damián Szifrón, it is a blackly comic film of modern life churning with frustration, rage, vengeance, and other decidedly civilized impulses. It opens on pure perfection, a darkly hilarious pre-credits revenge vignette that turns on […]
