Although this film takes place in Baltimore, it might as well be another country, so foreign to my personal experience is the world it shows, starting with sport? competition? of “step,” which is sort of like synchronized swimmng on land. This is one of those heartwarming documentaries that gets lucky, as we follow a group […]
If you think the West Texas of Hell or High Water was bleak, wait until you see Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation in Taylor Sheridan’s follow-up film. Not only is it bleak topographically, economically and psychologically, we see it in the depth of winter, with snow blanketing all signs of life. But bleak can be […]
Preaching to the choir, or more like droning to the choir, Al Gore is a plodding, un-nuanced presence to spend two hours with. The early scenes of global warming’s effects are bracing, but they are never really put in context and quickly give way to the former Vice President’s leadership training seminars. Shots of the […]
A totally fun movie, filled with colorful characters and a believably silly heist plot. It’s never clear whether we’re laughing at or with the good-old-boys of the NASCAR world. The fact that they get away with their robbery and nobody gets hurt suggests that Director Steven Soderbergh didn’t mean to insult; the movie’s lack of […]
Not a fun movie. In the first part you feel you are in the middle of Detroit’s 1967 race riot. In the next, you are held captive in the Algiers Hotel Annex as a trio of white policemen brutalize a random group of blacks, and two white girls. Then, in almost a coda, you see […]
A formulaic comedy about four old friends reuniting for a weekend on the town – in this case, EssenceFest in New Orleans – made fresh by starring four black women in an almost all-black setting, with one goofy and one out-of-it white woman as comic relief. Regina Hall was engaging as the woman who has […]
A group of French filmmakers sought to counter the despair provoked by climate change and the ongoing Sixth Extinction by finding examples that show how the world could survive in a better, sustainable way – sort of a filmic version of John Lennon’s Imagine. I can’t say it was convincing – more on that in […]
Dunkirk is an unpleasant assault on the senses, the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan stretched out for two hours. We see death by suicide, by being shot in the back, burned at sea, strafed from the air, blown up on the sand, drowned in vessel hold, shot from the sky, machine-gunned at close range, […]
Every summer needs a fun and innocent rom-com, and The Big Sick is it for 2017, with the crazily adorable Zoe Kazan filling the Julia Roberts/Meg Ryan role. The more recognizable Ray Romano and Holly Hunter are idiosyncratically good as Emily’s parents, while the Pakistani family of Kumail (who plays himself!) is just as enjoyable […]
This documentary tackled a fascinating subject – water rights in California – but left me with more questions than answers. It approached the topic from several different angles but never tied them together. The people of East Porterville had no running water for three years. Something called the Monterey Amendments set water allocations behind closed […]
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