The prequel series to Inspector Morse, about the early years of DC Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) in Oxford, is a darker show than either the long-running Morse, one of the most popular British detective shows ever made, or the contemporary sequel Inspector Lewis. Endeavour: Season 3 (2016) begins with Morse out of prison (after being […]
After a series of successful comedies that combined spoof, farce, and satire, Woody Allen took everyone by surprise with Annie Hall (1977), his first personal film and his most sophisticated to date. It drew from the same sources of humor as his earlier comedies, with interludes of memories seen through the lens of a comedian’s […]
The Big Short entered Oscar season with great reviews and five Academy Award nominations. It came away with a single win, for Best Adapted Screenplay for Charles Randolph and filmmaker Adam McKay. That’s pretty good for a director, previously known for guiding Will Ferrell through such comedies as Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys, […]
Juno (2007), the feel good film of the pregnant teenager comedy genre, was the success story of 2007, a low-budget comedy with an offbeat sensibility that was embraced by a youth audience and propelled into a mainstream hit. Ellen Page is impetuous and funny as the smart-mouthed high-school goofball who finds herself pregnant, the result […]
Son of Saul drops the viewer into the horror of the Holocaust with its first images. Saul (Géza Röhrig) is a Sonderkommando, chosen from the prisoners of a concentration camp to work in the gas chambers, and we are plunged into his crushing routine: moving the prisoners through the dressing rooms, sifting and sorting the […]
Capote (2005) – Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his astounding screen incarnation of real life author and New York intelligentsia celebrity Truman Capote as he researched and wrote his masterpiece “In Cold Blood,” his poetic reportage on the shocking murder of a smalltown Kansas family and the killers he […]
The big night is over. Chris Rock-ed the #OscarsSoWhite controversy with cutting humor that drew some nervous laughter from the audience. The presenters gave us a mix of sincerity and awkward schtick. The In Memoriam tribute honored Kirk Kevorkian, who all but gutted MGM decades ago, yet snubbed Abe Vigoda, Joan Leslie, and Jacques Rivette. […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand The Academy Awards will be handed out on Sunday and two of the Best Picture nominees are now available to watch at home: Spotlight, nominated for six awards and a favorite for the Original Screenplay category, and Room, up for four awards and a heavy favorite for Brie Larson as Best Actress. […]
Clara Bow takes top billing in Paramount’s lavish 1927 war drama Wings (1927) and Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen (both virtual unknowns at the time) play the buddies and fellow pilots at the center of the film, but the real star of this World War I picture is the amazing aerial spectacle: the dogfights […]
“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” All About Eve (1950), Joseph L. Mankeiwicz’s acerbic view askance at the Great White Way, is the writer/director’s Citizen Kane, a little less complex perhaps, but masterful in its own way in its cynical portrait of ambition on the boards. The barbed dialogue is […]
