If there have been more boring recent films than Benoît Jacquot’s “Last Love,” ("Dernier Amour" in the French original) none readily comes to mind. Though one must admit that it’s a feat in itself to have such rich material to deal with and to turn it into a yawn-inducing couple of hours. The last fling of the maestro of love himself, Giacomo Casanova, (and, if the script based on the Venetian adventurer’s own written story of
For Diane (Mary Kay Place), a kind of selfless stoic, everyone else comes first. Generous but with little patience for self-pity, she spends her days checking in on sick friends, volunteering at her local soup kitchen, and trying courageously to save her troubled, drug-addicted adult son (Jake Lacy) from himself. But beneath her unending routine of self-sacrifice, Diane is struggling with her own demons, haunted by a past she cannot let go
“Hotel Mumbai” is based on real events that took place in November 2008, when ten members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani Islamic terrorist organization, carried out an insanely-bold series of attacks on Mumbai, starting from the rail station and making their way to the Taj hotel where a number of guests were staying, including American ones.
A thriller directed by
When the perfectly-preserved body of a Stone Age man was found in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, it became a world sensation. "Ötzi" (renamed Kelab) was so well-preserved, in fact, that one could draw several different conclusions about his life and his violent passing. These hypotheses now make up the template of this new Felix Randau-directed film, and result in a gripping drama starring Jürgen Vogel in the role of
A half-century ago this summer two men stepped foot on the moon, the first time in our species’s history that human footprints were made on an object beyond Earth. Commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary are planned throughout 2019, and kicking off that great milestone is the new film “Apollo 11,” which begins its one-week IMAX run Friday before moving into general release March 8th.
While movie studios the world over scramble to create their own answers to the cultural/financial juggernaut of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, M. Night Shyamalan, the much-beloved, often-maligned creator of highly personal and unapologetically idiosyncratic thrillers, has managed it on his own, entirely. Shyamalan has finally completed his Eastrail 177 Trilogy, nineteen years in the making
When the documentary “Love, Gilda” premiered at last year’s Tribeca film festival I got left out in the cold. No ticket, it was a sellout. But after taking in the film’s premiere on CNN recently, I could see why “Love, Gilda” would garner such success. This tribute of the life of late comedienne Gilda Radner (1946-1989) is filled with warmth, cheer and heart. I was incredibly fortunate to be able to chat with Lisa D’Apolito about this
Hosting the Academy Awards used to be the hottest gig in Hollywood. Bob Hope made it classy, Johnny Carson made it fashionable and Billy Crystal made it hip. Unfortunately, of late it has become a job with as much reward and negativity as working in the Trump White House. The latest victim of its recent controversy is comedian Kevin Hart. Hart recently withdrew himself from the 2019 gig when homophobic tweets he made almost
Roger Ailes died in May 2017, but his legacy lives on in Fox News, the cable network bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch that many have accused of being little more than a mouthpiece for conservative agitprop and an apologist for President Trump. Whether or not Fox News was “responsible” for Donald Trump is a peripheral concern of the new documentary “Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes,” opening nationwide this week.
There was a time, before social media and cell phones, when a scandal took hours or even days to break publicly, and when a politician’s fortunes were perhaps not decided within seconds of being captured in a compromising photograph. That was the case in 1987, when Gary Hart, a rising Democratic star, seemed all but poised to sail easily to his party’s nomination to face Ronald Reagan’s Republican successor