Monthly Archives: October 2018

All actors, the old joke goes, want to play Jesus. It’s a Messiah complex that comes with the vocation. Gay actors, the out ones anyway, want to play Oscar Wilde. The greatest wit of his age, perhaps of any age, … Continue reading →

A little Poe, a bit of Agatha Christie Rod Serling and a touch of Pirandello? Six characters in search of an…escape.” Trapped, threatened with near certain death, reason it out, find the “clues” and get out of “Escape Room.” This … Continue reading →

The model/”Blurred Lines” stripped object of desire is making her way through the B-movie ranks, and Aaron Paul is re-starting his leading man career about a few Big Studio fizzles, and taking a paid Italian vacation while he does it … Continue reading →

Don’t know about you, but I can barely contain myself. I wasn’t going to be able to wait until Nov. 2, anyway. Thank heavens Fox figures it’s got a contender on its hands.  

You’re not going to confuse “Solis” with “Solaris” or “Sunshine,” but its effects are at least as good as in most of the space epics that involve somebody in some spaceship or other getting too close to the sun. And … Continue reading →

It’s the screen actors who pursue the quixotic that I find the most interesting. And nobody is more all-over-the-road than Stephen Dorff, the rugged, brooding star of half a dozen movies nobody sees in a given year, with just enough … Continue reading →

Here’s a little Warner Brothers bait and switch. La Llorona is a Mexican ghost, a spectral menace from South of the Border. This movie, starring Linda Cardellini, Patricia Velasquez, Raymond Cruz,  with Marisol Ramirez as “La Llorona,” doesn’t appear to … Continue reading →

“Mid90s’” captures a people and a place with the ring of the authentic, a grimly realistic depiction of skateboard culture in the working class LA where it blew up in the “Dogtown and Z-Boys” era. Jonah Hill’s writing and directing … Continue reading →

You’d swear that Oscar winner Sissy Spacek is injuring herself, as big as her grin is and as long as she holds it. Danny Glover and Tom Waits may be old pros playing ex-cons, but there’s something just tickled about … Continue reading →

Film fans revere Charlie Chaplin, but they — we — LOVE Buster Keaton. He was the embodiment of comic stoicism, an often hapless but never rattled “Great Stone Face” who never let on how funny he was or how hilarious … Continue reading →