Monthly Archives: October 2014

So here’s a big, broad academy-set satire of race relations in America, a “Do the Right Thing” meets “School Daze,” for those who speak Spike. Could be funny. Doesn’t look subtle.  Timely as all get out.  

“Birdman” is Michael Keaton’s comeback, the one sure thing in what was supposed to be a Year Long Michael Keaton comeback. That Aaron Paul race-across-America movie didn’t deliver, but “Birdman” is an Oscar nomination, possibly an Oscar win, for the … Continue reading →

We only hear about them if there’s video or audio — coaches, mostly — a Bobby Knight, grabbing and choking players, a Mike Rice, hurling basketballs and the foulest abuse at a recruit. We hear the rationalizations, shake our heads … Continue reading →

Whatever else children take from Judith Viorst’s delightful “Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day,” the sly subtext this picture-heavy book is how exhausting and sometimes misguided the optimism of the eternally optimistic can be. Parents who … Continue reading →

So it wasn’t the rains that kept the Turks from getting their cannons to Vienna, seizing the city and ending Western Civilization in the late 15th/early 16th centuries. It was Prince Vlad, hero of the Transylvanians, a misunderstood warrior with … Continue reading →

“The Judge” dawdles, lingers, takes sidebars and recesses — much like a celebrity trial in which TV cameras have been allowed into the courtroom. A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, … Continue reading →

“Kill the Messenger,” the film about journalist Gary Webb’s shocking newspaper stories that connected the Reagan Era CIA to America’s crack epidemic, shows just how hard it is to film investigative journalism as a drama, and get it right. The … Continue reading →

He first gained notice in the U.S. in “The Wire,” as a detective on that seminal cops-and-drug-dealers show. In his native U.K., he’s done lots of films and TV, with “The Hour,” a melodrama set in the world of early … Continue reading →