A delightful film that’s not without its dark side, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose follows a paranormal investigator looking into the case of a talking mongoose on the Isle of Man in the 1930’s. Simon Pegg in perhaps his best role to date gives Fodor a...
Landscape With Invisible Hand unwinds with a very unique atmosphere that at once combines social satire and science fiction. A noticeable Bradbury vibe exudes over the story. In the near future after first contact, the Earth is filled with floating cities housing the...
Only In Theaters The engrossing documentary Only in Theaters chronicles the Laemmle theater chain. This film encompasses over eighty years of movie theater ownership by a single family complimented by clips from classic films. If you’ve ever attended foreign or indie...
Perhaps one of the greatest honors a deceased writer can aspire to (if in fact the dead aspire to anything) is to have one of their books adapted for the stage. In the case of Agatha Christie, whose output includes the world’s longest running play, The Mousetrap, it...
Any movie revolving around a prank always works better when there’s a phone involved. Consider 1965’s I Saw What You Did, where a couple of bored teenage girls prank call people with pseudo-malicious intent only to have their victims hunt them down. Flash forward to...
The first test of an atomic bomb occurred at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexico desert. It was code named Trinity. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the head of the multi-headed hydra of science research called the “Manhattan Project.” There were multiple locations...
I’m not one to rate films with multiple sequels per se. For instance, making lists of the best films from a particular title, like the best Rocky or Star Trek movies doesn’t provoke interest in my neck of the woods. I know what I like and as far as M:I goes, the ones...
Sydney Pollack would be remembered if he’d only acted in films, rather than both performing in, directing, and producing some of the best movies made over the last 50 years. Some of the films Pollack acted in include: Eyes Wide Shut, Michael Clayton (which he also...
Wes Anderson is a name director in an era when comic book heroes are box office hits along with the occasional indie shoegaze crossover hit. While Anderson doesn’t command the clout of a James Cameron or Christopher Nolan, he can dependably deliver quaint...
Non-stop bustle provides the new Indiana Jones film a swift kick in the knapsack. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny remains just as presumptuous as its elongated title. Dial of Destiny the longest film yet in the saga of the archeologist cum world-weary...
If you bought record albums in the 1960’s or 70’s, Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) will superglue you to the screen. Let it be said there’s a vast difference in gleaming the cube as opposed to squaring the circle. Art students Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey...
If you were a kid in the 1970’s and loved superheroes you were lucky, because your childhood coincided with Marvel’s magnificent Bronze Age, with the even better Silver Age only proverbial minutes behind. These are just three of who knows how many comics I bought at...
The Flash accomplishes what many of the Warner Brothers inspired Detective Comics movies previously attempted: to provide a sense of fulfillment to the comic book genre while also expanding the possibilities of the multiverse concept. While not exactly a new concept,...
Poetry exudes from every pore of The Attachment Diaries (El Apeco), an Argentinian film with a unique look and unquestionably freaky vibes. The first half of the film unwinds in austere high contrast black-and-white until a shift to a golden hued color scheme...
Albert Einstein: People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Yogi Berra: It's deja vu all over again. It Ain’t Over presents more than a mere baseball documentary. A...
There’s a (somewhat) old saying, “Opinions are like a**holes. Everybody has one,” and it’s as true now as it was forty years ago. What’s different now is that you have to hear everyone’s opinions; all of the time; whether you want to or not. Perhaps ‘all of the time’...
If you’ve seen one Paul Schrader film, you haven’t necessarily seen them all. The opening shot of Master Gardener has Joel Edgerton as the enigmatic Narvel Roth at a desk writing in his diary. This is practically a stock Schrader moment as seen in his recent...
BlackBerry opens with a clip from the BBC Horizon series, a show dedicated to science and philosophy, where Arthur C. Clarke talks about the future. The year is 1964. “The traditional role of the city as a meeting place for man will have ceased to make any sense. In...
An amazing essay style documentary about Monument Valley by Alexandre O. Philippe, The Taking examines American iconography involving the skyscraper-like red sandstone structures that dominate the area. Sitting on the border of Arizona and Utah, Monument Valley...
It’s no secret that I am a pretty committed gamer, something that has been true since 1979, when I first began playing Dungeons and Dragons. I was in the sixth grade, and the game resonated with me in a way that previously only novels and movies could, but with a...
“The audience is talking about us but we’re also talking about the audience,” says Richard Thomas, currently starring as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. The stage production, adapted from Harper Lee’s novel by Aaron Sorkin, is currently touring North America...
It’s the rare action film that draws a line in the sand and then proceeds to cross said line with a vengeance. Sisu walks that walk. A title card informs the audience that Sisu is a Finnish word that means “stoic determination” or “guts.” In other words, this movie is...
Have you ever noticed that the fictional Sherlock Holmes has a chip on his shoulder the size of the Rock of Gibraltar? In the play, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Jersey Lily, that’s a good thing. The plays that have been adapted from Sir Arthur Canon Doyle’s...
Dead Ringers, which released in 1988, was a very Cronenbergish excursion into the macabre, based on the true story of twin-brother gynecologists and starring Jeremy Irons in one of his most skillful performances. The movie won plaudits for its storyline as well as its...
Technically, Guy Ritchie’s new film is called Guy Ritchie's The Covenant. Perhaps this is to distinguish it from other films with that title, which frankly sounds like a religious thriller but in this case is a tightly constructed action flick set in a world of modern...
Documentaries are a strange genre of movies. The presentation of facts and myth can often be twisted to suit an agenda, yet at the same time the barrage of imagery transports the viewer to another reality in a satisfying manner that narrative films can’t always match....
A mocking tribute to movies about organized crime, Mafia Mamma wants to be both relevant and sardonic in equal doses. The movie achieves as many chuckles as it does groans. Collette works out at a gym where the women chant “pray, love, fuck” as their mantra of...
The Man in the High Castle (1962) The novel is set in an alternative history in which the Axis powers were victorious in the Second World War, and the United States has been divided up between German and Japanese empires, the Germans controlling the East Coast, the...
No matter how many streaming and network shows get the high resolution do over there’s something to be said for television series that charted the then unknown seas of broadcast entertainment. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet ran for 14 seasons on the ABC network,...
Air, the new film from Ben Affleck, is a slam dunk. The movie chronicles the origins of the Air Jordan sports shoe by Nike in 1984. Affleck himself scores a triple double as a producer, director, and actor. A basketball film that’s not really about basketball might...
A wry look at a single mother raising a daughter, One Fine Morning frames the story in a dramatic context yet constantly finds humor and good nature in the story. It's a kind of Gallic kitchen-sink realism that pays attention to the thoughts and feelings of Léa...
One of the most shared stories to come out of the 2023 SXSW Film Festival was the heckler at the world premiere of Evil Dead Rise on March 15. A man sitting in the balcony yelled out “This movie fucking sucks” during the post-premiere Q&A with the film’s...
The Zombies occupy a respectable place below The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, and maybe one or two other influential British rock groups of the 1960’s. Yet The Zombies are known on a level a notch above other influential groups of that era like The...