They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for January, 2016
Amy (2015)
I have, for a long while, been critical of modern music which to these 40+ ears often sounds like the same song with the same message sung to a different tune. The subject matter treads the safe waters of romantic proclamations and freak-o mating habits with barely a hint of the person behind the lyrics. […]
Room (2015)
The first sounds we hear are breathing. Then a voice whispers “Go back to sleep.” Barely a light reaches the interior of the room and we see expressionist images that are startling; scratches on a wall, a dirty sink, a metal door, eggshells, linoleum, a tiny television set. These things are contained in a space […]
Blog: Are the Academy Awards racist?
Oh, what a monologue Chris Rock must be cooking up for this year’s Academy Awards. It is not a stretch to suggest that on the morning of February 29th, the topic of conversation of the 88th Academy Awards will move swiftly from the winners to questions of diversity. Almost as soon as the nominees were […]
The Boy (2016)
To make a creepy doll movie takes a lightness of touch. You have to employ atmosphere, pacing, good editing, a good script, plus a doll that you can believe that someone would actually own. The Boy has none of these things. It is a competently made movie operating on a silly premise that the filmmakers […]
Spotlight (2015)
We have progressed far enough now that we can easily look back at the turn of the millennium with a sense of wonder, reflection and some fear. The clock had barely clicked over into a new century when we found ourselves in a state of panic and paranoia; first Y2K, then a Presidential election that […]
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Picture in your mind the output of a Quentin Tarantino movie if it were written by Agatha Christie. Try and imagine “Ten Little Indians” wrapped in reams of Tarantino-style dialogue and splattered with buckets of blood and guts and there you have the idea of The Hateful Eight, a retro spaghetti western that is as […]
