Pedro Almodóvar is not adverse to taking his audience to uncomfortable places. Often using comedy and melodrama, or his own unique mixture of the two, as...
The painting at the center of The Goldfinch is an example of trompe l’oeil, a flat painted surface that “tricks the eye” into believing it is...
Walter Pater, the late Victorian art theorist, famously said, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” He was speaking of the condition where form and meaning are...
Bruce Springsteen begins his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town with these words…
The poster for Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical new film, The Souvenir, is like the photo on the box of a jigsaw puzzle; it shows the entire image when...
This review will be two reviews in one. First off, will the kids like this movie? Boy, I am hard pressed to say one way or...
When one watches a Yorgos Lanthimos film, one must be prepared for a bit of nastiness. Or rather, an orgy of nastiness. Whatever cynical pessimism one...
There are some movies, like people, that seem determined to please. Peter Farrelly’s Green Book is such a film. Though most people-pleasing fare is light and...
Parenting is arguably one of the most important … is it a job? a task? a vocation? … that any of us will ever undertake.
There’s a scene in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing when Señor Love Daddy, the neighborhood DJ on We Love Radio played by Samuel L. Jackson, reads out...
Most children’s stories, fantasies at least, need magic to work. That is, there’s usually some means by which the everyday, the known, is mixed with or...
When Morgan Neville won the Oscar for his documentary, Fifty Feet From Stardom, I wonder if he knew that his follow-up film was going to be...
Life hurts. Facile films use this truth to extract drama. The worst of them exploit the characters, and in turn, the audience, for effect. One comes...
There’s an old Russian joke: What happens when you put a group of conniving, sycophantic, power-hungry, self-serving, ruthless, frightened, nasty men together in a room?
Let me make something clear from the start. Some movies make you feel glad there are movies, and some movies make you glad you are alive....
Some films stand alone, while others provide bridges. Some films are definitive, while others open up discourse.
Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult, Lebanon’s Best Foreign Film Oscar candidate, is a heartfelt and strident message movie, and how successfully and powerfully that message gets across depends...
Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s new western, wants to be taken seriously. It wants to say important things, address essential themes, and say it all with unflinching intensity...
Martin Scorsese says that each film usually has a single frame that in visual terms defines and encapsulates the film. Think of George Bailey, in Frank...