• “Joker,” a morality-defying, two-hour drop down a man’s impaired psyche

    I’m always skeptical when a film receives too much hype. With the on-again, off-again quality of American fare, I try not to set my hopes too high, especially when it comes to a film about the D.C. Comics's The Joker, by the director of “The Hangover” series.

    It is with great pleasure that I report that, while the film itself isn’t the cinematic masterpiece that some have christened it, Todd Phillips’s “Joker” is one of the finest films of 2019 with Joaquin Phoenix delivering one of the great performances of modern cinema, and definitely his personal best.

  • CANNES FESTIVAL, competition closes with Lynne Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here”

    Joaquin Phoenix is in full beast mode in Lynn Ramsay’s “You were never really here,” a head-scratching drama whose action begins in Cincinnatti, curiously, and moves to New York City. Phoenix is muscular, wears a scowl for much of the film, a glint of evil in the stare. There’s a little bit of something for everyone in this film: a sexually-deviant governor, murders with a hammer, underage prostitutions, ghosts, PTSD and battle scars.

  • Inherent vice

    In college I wrote a paper on the subversion of the detective novel in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. I got an A, although the paper received its highest compliment in 2009. That’s when Pynchon finally lived up to my astonishing insight and published a detective novel, “Inherent vice.” This survey of Los Angeles weirdness circa 1970 is brought to the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson. The Crying of Lot 49 features suburban housewife Oedipa Maas

  • Her

    It’s the oldest story in the book: boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl live happily ever after.

    The problem? The girl in this instance is a computer, and the boy is the lonely Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix). Theodore, who spends his days composing love letters for other people, is slogging through the aftermath of a failed marriage when he purchases an artificially intelligent operating system. His drab life, backlit by a vaguely

  • The Master

    After “Battlefield Earth” who would've thought that scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard would ever be portrayed seriously in film again? “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film since 2007’s “There Will Be Blood”, does just that. It neither condemns nor justifies the religion, but centers on the fascinating struggle of two men. Joaquin Phoenix’s faux mental breakdown is over, thankfully, and he has returned to acting in

  • I’m still here

    You wonder what Joaquin Phoenix and director/brother-in-law Casey Affleck had […]

  • Two Lovers

    This year’s James Gray vintage (We Own The Night was […]

  • We Own the Night

    At the Cannes Festival sometimes things can turn violent between journalists. Or at least that's what I feared upon exiting the Debussy theatre this past May after a press screening of James Gray's We Own the Night, which has its commercial release later this October. The film got copiously booed as end credits rolled--in my opinion because of its formulaic zeal, when you see the final scene, you'll understand--and I partook in the booing. After all, what's a festival if not for the prerogative to holler out your views loud and clear?