A Most Wanted Man (2014) is the final film completed by Philip Seymour Hoffman before his untimely death in 2014. That alone is reason enough to see the film, adapted from the post 9/11 novel by John le Carré and directed by Anton Corbijn, a music video veteran who becomes more accomplished with each feature. […]
Winner of the Academy Awards for Best Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, as well as Best Ensemble Cast by the Screen Actors Guild, Best Screenplay by the Writer’s Guild of America, Best Picture by the American Film Institute, and scores of other awards from professional and critics organizations, Spotlight (2015) is the kind of film that […]
Who would have predicted that Midnight in Paris (2011) would become Woody Allen’s most financially successful film ever? On the one hand, the wish fulfillment fantasy of an American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) on a Paris vacation who is whisked back in time and welcomed into the company of the Lost Generation artists of the twenties, […]
There isn’t a lot of passion in Brian De Palma’s Passion (2012, R) but there is a love of kinkiness, flirtation, sensation, and the thrill of playing big business games and an odd intimacy that we don’t always get in De Palma’s coolly observed, stylistically exacting cinema. The opening scene has an easy intimacy of […]
Doctor Strange (2016), the Sorcerer Supreme of Marvel Comics, is the latest comic book hero to join Marvel’s cinematic universe and Benedict Cumberbatch (in his best impression of American arrogance) plays the broken neurosurgeon who dons the Cloak of Levitation and the Eye of Agamotto to bring magic to the MCU. He’s Stephen Strange, a […]
The Little Prince (2016), an animated feature based on the beloved novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery and directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda), is a big-budget American production from a major studio and played in theaters around the world (where it was a success) but Sony dumped it straight to Netflix in […]
