The traveler’s guide to Hell on Earth
1917 is the film that the centennial of the Great War deserved, arriving a couple of years late but still welcome.
1917 is the film that the centennial of the Great War deserved, arriving a couple of years late but still welcome.
As Harvey Weinstein discovers that the light at the end of his tunnel is the headlight of the oncoming #MeToo locomotive, it’s thought-provoking indeed to be reminded that this train first left the station at Fox News, where, in 2016, nobody dared call herself a feminist.
Little Women is quite frankly a superb work of cinema, and will prove richly rewarding for male as well as female viewers.
A man known for his personal environmental activism – particularly on the subject of fracking here in New York State – Mark Ruffalo the movie star disappears admirably into the role of a most unflashy, but doggedly tenacious, modern American hero.
True, it’s not 100 percent original in its slapstick depiction of Hitler and his minions; Charlie Chaplin got there first, followed by The Producers and Hogan’s Heroes and quite a few more. And it does skim lightly over the enormity of human suffering at the hands of the Third Reich and its enablers. But grappling with such tragedy head-on is the work of a different genre of filmmaking. Jojo Rabbit revels in heaping scorn on the perpetrators, and I haven’t laughed this loudly at a movie in a long time.
This was a movie long overdue to be made. That’s what makes it such an unhappy task to report that, despite several fine performances and one outstanding characterization on the part of star Cynthia Erivo, Harriet is a pretty tepid moviegoing experience.
Critics are calling Pain and Glory, the Spanish auteur’s crowning semiautobiographical work, comparing it to Fellini’s 81/2. Pedro Almodóvar’s film is also being lauded, justly, as a career high for Antonio Banderas.
Meryl Streep plays Ellen Martin, the fictionalized widow of one of the victims of the 2005 wreck of the tour boat Ethan Allen on Lake George. Her insurance claim falls through the holes in a multileveled net of phony corporations that have bought one another out to a point where there’s no accountability left, and mild-mannered Ellen gets ticked off enough to pursue the perpetrators with increasingly singleminded purpose.
Renee Zellweger makes the connection between Judy Garland and her audience feel visceral and real. Their love, we see, is Garland’s ultimate addiction.
After the Wedding is an emotional rollercoaster, its rapid-fire plot twists accelerating the closer it draws to its climax.