March 29, 2023 4:22 am
I beg of you, writers, enough with the gritty remakes. The single star which I have awarded FX’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” belongs to the following people: Olivia Colman, reliably excellent as Miss Havisham; Matthew Needham, having an absolute ball playing a demented spice baron; Matt Berry, given too little screen time as …
French writer/director Léa Mysius concocts a compelling witch’s brew with “The Five Devils,” but the result doesn’t quite come together with the potency she’d desired. With her second feature, Mysius tells a story about racism, sexism, small-town provincialism, and homophobia, all within the alluring swirl of a supernatural thriller. There’s also a time-travel element that …
Garrett Hedlund’s is a screen presence I can take or leave alone. So it’s saying something that about halfway through this remarkably inconsequential thriller, I was thinking, “What did the poor guy do to deserve this?” And then thinking similar thoughts about Victoria Justice, who plays Annie, his pregnant girlfriend. “The Tutor,” directed by Jordan Ross …
At first, the new season of Showtime’s hit “Yellowjackets” concerned me. Its first couple episodes don’t quite have the buzz of last year, in part because of how the storytelling seems like it’s cleaning up a few things from the Emmy-nominated first season but also because it’s reasonable to worry that this show doesn’t quite …
Showtime’s Yellowjackets Expands in Ambitious Second Season Read More »
“Hurt people hurt people,” often used in the context of empathy or forgiveness, is a valid statement about how patterns repeat unless people take steps to understand and change them. But it is also true that in some cases, only hurt people can help other hurting people. Their lived experience gives them credibility in sharing …
Welcome back, Mr. Wick. Four years after “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum,” director Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves have returned to theaters with “John Wick: Chapter 4,” a film that was supposed to hit theaters almost two full years ago. Trust me. It was worth the wait. Stahelski and writers Shay Hatten and Michael …
Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) sits in a coffee shop reading a book. A pamphlet falls out. She reads: “What can YOU do? Join us as we work towards changing the way history views this much-maligned monarch!” The “much-maligned monarch” is Richard III. Sparked by curiosity, Philippa—not an academic or historian—follows the pamphlet’s call and attends …
“The Worst Ones” revolves around the production of a film-within-a-film, whose director, Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh), insists on casting nonprofessional actors for vague reasons concerning authenticity. The four kids he chose were all plucked from the cité Picasso housing project in a poor suburb of the small French town of Boulogne-Sur-Mer. Locals wonder aloud why the …
Director Chad Stahelski has a John Wick-esque hunger for beating a challenge, starting with his days as a stuntman (later doubling for his star, Keanu Reeves) before moving on to martial arts choreography and second-unit directing. That background offered a special intuition for his impressive directorial debut (with co-director David Leitch), “John Wick.” The premise of that …
The Whole Gag is Excess: Chad Stahelski on John Wick: Chapter 4 Read More »
Tori and Lokita call each other brother and sister. Biologically, it’s not true. Emotionally it’s more true than anyone around them could know. Their relationship is the core of “Tori and Lokita,” a tight, heartrending social realist drama from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who’ve worked in the genre for decades and do it better than almost …
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