Blancanieves (2009), an inventive retelling of Snow White as a silent-movie melodrama in the 1920s world of bullfighting royalty and flamenco style in Spain, stirs in grand melodrama, circus fantasy, and toreador hero worship with a mix of silent film conventions and contemporary storytelling. We’re talking the same sort of modern silent film as The […]
Indonesian action star Iko Uwais (The Raid: Redemption) plays a young chef who is gifted with the power of a thousand monks to fight evil in Wu Assassins: Season 1, a martial arts action series with a dash of fantasy set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Katheryn Winnick and Mark Dacasos costar. 10 episodes streaming on […]
Steven Soderbergh’s Che (2008) is both two features and one work, a 4 ½-hour production that carves out what Soderbergh, producer/star Benicio Del Toro, and screenwriter Peter Buchman see as the two defining periods in the life of Ernesto Che Guevara: the Cuban Revolution and the Bolivian expedition. Except for a brief scene where Guevara […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Netflix brings its signature original series to a close with the seventh and final season of Orange Is the New Black. Based on the memoir by Piper Kerman, renamed Piper Chapman and played by […]
For All Mankind (1989), Al Reinert’s celebration of the nine manned space flights between 1968 and 1972, was released to theaters in 1989, twenty years after first manned moon landing. It’s a stunning tribute composed entirely of the film documentation shot and archived by NASA, not a documentary of an Apollo mission but the story […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Mary Poppins Returns (2018, PG) stars Emily Blunt as Britain’s most famous nanny, who floats back into the lives of the now-grown Jane and Michael Banks (Emily Mortimer and Ben Whishaw) to help with […]
The third season of Stranger Things, the Netflix Original tribute to eighties movies and pop culture, ushers the kids of Hawkins, Indiana, into a summer adventure with a new monster unleashed from the Upside Down and a new challenge: growing up. It’s also nice to see the girls getting a bigger role in the series. […]
Peter Fonda was already a counterculture icon when he suited up in black leather and a star-spangled helmet, mounted a Harley-Davidson chopper, tossed his watch to the desert floor, and drove off with a shaggy Dennis Hopper in search of America. The film was Easy Rider (1969), an independent film produced by Fonda, directed by Hopper, […]
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 Oscar-winning, family-friendly animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, PG) offers up a new take on the classic story with Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) getting bitten by the radioactive spider and […]
In a Lonely Place (1950) hasn’t much to do with the Dorothy B. Hughes novel on which it was ostensibly based, beyond the title (one of the most evocative in noir history), the Los Angeles setting, and the murder of a young woman that puts our ostensible hero, volatile, hard-drinking Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey […]
