I spent the whole movie wondering where it was going, and at the end I still didn’t know. Were we supposed to be impressed by how Ruben, the heavy metal drummer, was handling his deafness, or depressed? Was he courageous or reckless? It seemed, by the last shot, that he had thrown everything away, but […]
A very brave movie, in that it confirmed, indeed celebrated, all my negative stereotypes about India and Indians: corrupt, servile, class-bigoted and dirty, for starters. Politics and religion don’t come off much better. Nor does the movie sugarcoat anything with a happy ending. Our star, “the white tiger,” rises to the top by murdering his […]
It must be hard to make a dramatically interesting movie about archaeology, based on the evidence of The Dig. To keep things moving, the writers threw in an unrelated plane crash, a love affair between the mousy bride of a gay archaeologist and the proprietor’s dashing cousin, a buffoonish museum curator and the rapidly approaching death […]
The third installment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series continued the story of systemic racism in, now, 1980s London, as (real-life) Leroy Logan, portrayed by the excellent John Boyega, tries to integrate, and humanize, the local police force. By now, whenever we see a white cop we assume the worst. More interesting is the exploration […]
How did I miss this in 2014? I’m a sucker for any rock star biopic and James Brown is…well, James Brown. Forget Ma Rainey, Chadwick Boseman’s performance as the “hardest-working man in show business” is over-the-top Oscar-worthy. Somehow executive music producer Mick Jagger synced great performances of Brown’s best hits with Boseman’s electric acting. Throw in […]
The idea of four iconic Black men from disparate fields meeting in a hotel room the night of the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight in 1964 is an intriguing conceit for a stage play, which this was, but it hasn’t been translated to the screen. This was one of the slower movies I’ve watched; it seemed […]
“Mr. Rogers time-travels to North Texas c. 1870.” This movie was so hokey and so Tom Hanksy that I bailed after 30 minutes, despite the luscious photography and the hefty $19.99 streaming price.
Part 1 is a sharp interpersonal psychodrama as a flirty screenwriter arrives at a lakeside retreat and disrupts the shaky marriage of the couple living there. Part 2 shows the same story, with the female leads reversed, being made as a movie, with a messy but funny cast of a dozen. Is Part 1, then, […]
A consistently clever, lighthearted and authentic trip to the art world of lower-middle-class Blacks in New York City, as Rhada Blank, a/k/a “Miss B” and “RhadaMUSPrime,” bounces between playwriting and rapping while teaching a high school theater class hung up on genitalia. Filmed in black-and-white – why? to point out its racial aspects? – the […]
If you like depressing Irish movies about spousal abuse and a mother with two kids, no money, no home and no prospects, this is your cup o’ tea. Fortunately, through a series of improbable good breaks, our heroine ends up about where she started, but quit of the abusive husband. Clare Dunn, who co-wrote and […]
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