My Favorite Movies: The Original Star Wars Trilogy (1977-1983)
It is nearly impossible to see this as [...]
Foreign
Animal Kingdom (2024)
I’ll admit, I don’t normally think of a Sci-Fi fantasy coming out of France, but . . . here we are. Tim Cailly’s Animal Kingdom, which got a lot of kudos when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last yearworks because it takes it oddball premise and attaches it to a scenario that we […]
Afire (2023)
Here in the third week of July, when fully 90% of the moviegoing public is going to give their love to The Barbenheimer (I did), it’s unlikely that any will pass them up for a quiet character-study from Germany about a potential loser and his friends trapped by a wild fire. This is the film […]
Two Tickets to Greece (2023)
Going in, I had no idea what Two Tickets to Greece was about. Given the title, I kind of expected yet another wacky vacation-gone-wrong comedy, an inheritor to National Lampoon’s Vacation which just turned 40, or on the downside, something like the recent yawn-inducing Joy Ride. The result: Yes, it’s about a vacation where nothing goes right, but its […]
Revoir Paris (2023)
The other day my local news reported a memorial for a mass shooting. I asked my wife a startling question, “Which mass shooting are they talking about?” She didn’t know. There have been so many lately that I can’t tell one from another. It is startling to think that they have become part of our […]
A Chiara (2022)
A Chiara from filmmaker Jonas Carpignano is an Italian-language drama that bears an interesting idea. In the midst of teen angst, confusion, changes and discoveries, what would happen if added to that was the revelation that your father was a wanted criminal? What would be your emotional state? How would it hit you psychologically? You […]
The Innocents (2021)
Norwegian director Eskil Vogt got a double-honor at this year’s Academy Awards, first by getting a writing nomination along with his collaborator Joachim Trier for The World Person in the World and also saw his film nominated for Best International Feature. That film, about the adventures of a young woman that could easily be written […]
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 […]
Vortex (2022)
It is always a great joy to present a four-star review to a film by a director whose work that I habitually avoid. That’s not an indication that Argentine director Gaspar Noé’s fails as an artist necessarily, but his content is a little difficult to stomach. His earlier films have tended to be nihilistic, sexually violent, […]
