The 95th Academy Awards Race: Best Original Song
The Nominees are . . . • "Lift Me [...]
Drama
Pleasure (2021)
Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure is a movie whose overriding results lay in the eye of the beholder, dependent largely on what you’re willing to take. This is an explicitly graphic but narratively spare NC-17 portrait of a young immigrant from Sweden who travels to the sunbaked coast of L.A. with the goal of building a career in […]
Happening (2021)
Audrey Diwan’s French drama Happening arrives in the United States at the very moment when the SCOTUS leak has led to raging protests over the possibility of overturning the historic Roe vs. Wade decision, giving individual states the right to control and even ban abortions, which, for the past 48 years, have remained legal. If […]
All My Puny Sorrows (2022)
Despite Johnny Mandel and Michael Altman’s legendary theme to MASH, suicide is anything but painless. It does bring on many changes, but with it come heartbreak, confusion and years and years of searching for a punctuation, an end-mark, an answer. Suicide is chaos and despair for those left behind. This was my family’s experience. In […]
Marvelous and the Black Hole (2022)
Marvelous and the Black Hole is the most harmless movie that I’ve seen in a while. I was in a good mood watching it, and maybe that helped. Were I in a sour mood, it’s cuteness might have been galling. Given the right mood, it is one of those little movies that you just want to […]
Dual (2022)
Up to this point, I have been like many in regards to actress Karen Gillian in that I have only known her for her (as of this writing) four appearances in the MCU as Nebula, the tortured quasi-villainous sister to Gamora. Given the dark, conflicted nature of that role, I had wondered what else she […]
The Best Picture Winners: CODA (2021)
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have been handing out awards for more than 90 years, and the results have been spotty at best. That applied most aptly to their selections for Best Picture. In this series I am looking down the barrel at each of their selections for better and, very often, […]
The Tale of King Crab (2022)
Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’ The Tale of King Crab opens with a moment that I found completely inviting. We’re in Tuscia in the company of a group of grizzled Italian fisherman, their faces weathered as much by the storms of life as by the elements of mother nature. They are […]
The Girl and the Spider (2022)
One is tempted to look at The Girl and the Spider and toss it into the bin of ‘art for art’s sake.’ I get that. It contains no moment of high drama, no conventuous leerings that paint the actor’s performances with Oscar clips. It is a drama, but not a riveting drama in any conventional […]
