Midnight Special (2016) begins in the dark, literally and figuratively. Two men in an anonymous motel room keep the shades drawn awaiting the cover of night. There’s a boy wearing goggles and reading comic books with a flashlight under the covers. It may be part of the whole covert thing or it may just be […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … The weekly column is featured in The Seattle Times, The Spokesman-Review, and other newspapers. After the major film studio passed, Martin Scorsese turned to Netflix to finance “The Irishman” (2019, R) his latest and […]
Four years after Steven Soderbergh’s “retirement” from feature filmmaking (he found a loophole by making Behind the Candelabra for HBO and creating and directing the cable series The Knick), he returned to the big screen with Logan Lucky (2017), a bouncy, deft, sweetly and cleverly comic heist picture about a pair of hard-luck brothers in […]
Paterson (2016) is the name of Adam Driver’s character, a blue collar city bus driver; the location, Paterson, NJ; and a reference to a book of poetry by William Carlos Williams, a son of Paterson (the city) and the favorite poet of Paterson (the man), who is also a poet. Got it? Paterson pens his […]
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), directed by the Coen Bros. and starring Oscar Isaac in his breakthrough role, was almost entirely overlooked at the Oscars. Perhaps that’s because, despite the astounding recreation of the Greenwich Village scene and an atmosphere and texture that you can almost feel through the screen, struggling folk singer Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) […]
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) – J.J. Abrams takes the reins of the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas with what is technically a sequel (Chapter VII: The Force Awakens) but is just as much a course correction, a reboot, and a return to the source. It’s been called a shameless remake of the […]
