Enchanted April (1991) – Josie Lawrence and Miranda Richardson are the two quietly miserable middle class wives who impulsively (and passionately) decide to escape their dreary world in post-World War I London and their distracted, pompous husbands and rent a castle on the Italian coast. When they wake up in their villa after a rainy […]
Sam Raimi’s adaptation of the legendary super-hero comic book continues in the high young-adult melodrama mode in Spider-Man 2 (2004). Peter Parker’s (Tobey Maguire) life is a shambles: his studies suffer in the (im)balance of school, work, and crime-fighting, his romance with redheaded sweetheart M.J. (Kirsten Dunst) is sacrificed to the demands of his alter-ego, […]
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Jim Jarmusch’s whimsical, 17-years-in-the-making anthology is “a series of short films disguised as a feature (or maybe vice-versa),” according to the director. It’s an anthology of curiosities, some more curious than others, wound around a diverse cast paired off for random ramblings over caffeine and nicotine. It opens with the original […]
Angie Tribeca: Season One – I loved Police Squad, the short-lived TV comedy from the creators of Airplane! that spoofed TV cop shows with an anything goes approach. Only six episodes were made before the networks gave up on it. This was 1982, after all, back in the days when only three major networks existed, […]
HBO has just given streamers another reason to subscribe to HBO Now. Show Me a Hero, a six-hour miniseries developed by David Simon (The Wire) and William F. Zorzi from the non-fiction book by Lisa Belkin and directed by Paul Haggis (with a subtlety and nuance I didn’t know he had in him), stars Oscar […]
