John Michael McDonagh’s “The Forgiven” walks the ever-fine line between artful examination and utter monotony. Adapting Lawrence Osborne’s novel, McDonagh’s film takes place over one weekend in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco and skewers the privilege of the wealthy and white.
David (Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (Jessica Chastain) are traveling to a party taking place in the Moroccan desert. Late, lost
Scott Derrickson’s “The Black Phone” continues 2022’s sad streak of being one of the most uninteresting years on record.
Based on an excellent short story from author Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son), director Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill adapted the creepy tale of a Colorado town plagued by a serial killer of children known as “The Grabber," so named
A star is born in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis.” Austin Butler’s performance as the rock'n'roll legend is simply jaw-dropping. In an astonishing turn, the actor melts completely into Elvis, announcing the arrival of one hell of a committed actor. Unfortunately, Butler’s performance (and a couple of scenes towards the film’s end) are the only worthy piece of this near travesty of a motion picture.
The massively over-directed
The debates about the greatest pitcher of all time inevitably bring up names including Sandy Koufax, Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens. The latter two appear in “Facing Nolan” to talk about Nolan Ryan, the man who idolized Koufax–and then shattered all of his records.
Ryan, now 75 and still sporting that understated grin, sits for writer-director Bradley Jackson’s enthralling new documentary
Set in Texas during the 1992 presidential election writer/director Jennifer Waldo’s “Acid Test” is a tale about coming of age and jumping out of your mind.
Set against the backdrop of the nineties Riot Grrrl movement (the underground feminist punk movement that began in the early nineties), Waldo’s energetic and always-interesting film blends cultural revolution
June 17, 2022, marked the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the fallout of which would eventually lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Nixon and his tricksters were held to account in the end, largely thanks to brave insiders such as Alexander Butterfield, who disclosed the existence of the secret White House taping system, as well as Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell.
Colin Trevorrow’s “Jurassic World Dominion” is simultaneously the worst James Bond film, the worst Indiana Jones film, and the worst film of the entire “Jurassic Park/Jurassic World” series.
So much of this film’s screenplay (written by Emily Carmichael and Trevorrow) is a pastiche of Bond film, Indiana Jones rip-offs, and call backs to Steven Spielberg’s original “Jurassic Park,” each scene making me think back on a time when all of this was new.
Brian Goodman’s “Last Seen Alive” is the cinematic equivalent of a filmmaker spitting in the face of moviegoers. It would be a travesty if the whole film wasn’t such a waste of time. A tired action movie plot is laid out with no ideas or originality, borrowing from better (and worse!) films, tricking audiences into thinking they will have a good time. Gerard Butler is Will and he is going through
To describe David Cronenberg’s latest work “Crimes of the Future” as mere body horror is to do it a small disservice.
Make no mistake, this picture is very much a return to the world of the grotesque, an area where Cronenberg is a master, but the film’s screenplay (written by the director) holds much more.
Along with Richard Pryor, George Carlin was a groundbreaker in the comedy world. As Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio’s documentary “George Carlin’s American Dream” shows, the comedian had a comic vision of Nostradamus-like proportions.
The film digs deep and gets to the soul of Carlin’s philosophies. The man could be called a comedic prophet, as his political and