Pure catnip: an Aaron Sorkin drama with pithy dialogue, clearly drawn characters, a hopefully moral universe and a healthy dose of politics, past and present. Being in my personal revisit-Vietnam moment helped. Having just watched Platoon, the Ken Burns 10-part documentary, Da 5 Bloods and having read Oliver Stone’s and Randy Hobler’s memoirs, this moment of […]
If nothing else, this film immersed me in an unfamiliar world, Black life in Louisiana. Maybe there was nothing else. The story covered 20 years between Sibil and Robert’s failed bank robbery and Robert’s long-awaited release from jail. Without any other facts, though, no points were made about the justice or incarceration systems. Most remarkable were […]
A charmingly unprofessional six-parter set in post-invasion Iraq, with political and ideological overtones overlaying the conflicts: Arab-Western, British-American, Arab-Arab. Waleed Zuaiter excels as the unflappable former Iraqi inspector who navigates the political shoals while trying to find one rebel daughter and get medical help for the other. (Rather like the hero in Trapped.) Corey Stoll […]
A worthy 10-episode drama for its Icelandic scenery alone, but the characters made returning to it night-after-night as welcome as the hearth in a storm. Best of all was Olafur Darri Olafsson as the bear of an unflappable small-town police chief, but the rest of his team, Hinrika and Asgeir, were also notable for their […]
What’s the problem with social media? This film cites two, without particularly differentiating them. 1) It’s an addiction that is consuming the time and minds of the younger generation, especially. 2) It’s driving the polarization of our society, as “likes” determine what information people receive. The first appears soluble, as several of the expert talking […]
A thoroughly enjoyable musical biography of Gordon Lightfoot, with a Canadian viewpoint and tone. The title song alone was achievement enough for a lifetime, but Lightfoot’s career extended through two eras – the folk rock of the ’60s and singer-songwriter era of the ’70s – both fertile periods with wonderful memories to revive. Practically every […]
A scary and depressing documentary about the annual American Legion-sponsored gathering of 17-year-olds, in which 1,200 boys divide into two parties and spend a week forming a government, this one from 2018 in Austin, Texas. Scary and depressing because even at that idealistic age, politics is seen as a cynical exercise and abortion and gun […]
A limp excuse for an unnecessary second season about a crime that was handled quite well in season one. There was no character development and the story consisted of a subplot that was hard to follow and harder to accept and a court proceeding that, week in and week out, made no sense at least […]
It is a pleasure to enter the lush world of the French Riviera, albeit on the small TV screen, and to return to the world of French (Belgian) cinema, where the “action” is a series of conversations, with some (large) bare breasts thrown in. I was somehow reminded of Proust by this story of an […]
Imagine the most demeaning job you can think of, despite the status of working as assistant (what used to be called “secretary”) to the ceo of a glamorous entertainment company. Then imagine a movie that consists entirely of living through one day in that job, exclusively from the assistant’s point of view. I kept waiting […]
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