Monthly Archives: February 2020

The KKK opens a museum whitewashing its history in a South Carolina town, and a pastor tries to blunt its message by reaching out to a grand dragon. Garret Hedlund and the omnipresent Andrea Riseborough also star.

Imagine a nightclub that’s a mad melange of old school burlesque, classic balladeers and jumped-up Portuguese Latin rock, of strippers and stand-up comedy with an occasional dominatrix. It’s old fashioned showbiz set in a mobbed-up milieu with “Goodfellas” decor, way … Continue reading →

    The austere beauty of “Vitalina Varela” is in faces of its characters, the darkness that envelops a corner of Lisbon tourists rarely see. It’s a somber, lyrical and relentlessly understated meditation on grief and a grudge, the story … Continue reading →

Pixar’s trailers rarely give away enough of the movie to let you write the picture off pre release. The “Onward” trailers have left me cold. But you just don’t know, even if Disney Animation has stolen their thunder, even if … Continue reading →

“The Night Clerk” is a murder mystery with a killer premise. A man with Asperger’s witnesses a killing. The movies and TV, which have treated this as a “Malady of the Month” for a few years now, teach us what … Continue reading →

This bad boy comes our way Mar. 17 — streaming, VOD.  

Did you swoon over Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” his lyrical but meandering two hour and 15 minute recreation of his middle class Mexico City upbringing, as seen mostly through the eyes of his indigenous nanny? The black and white memoir won … Continue reading →

It isn’t just funeral homes that get caught ripping off the grieving. Cemeteries do it, too.

“Miss Virginia” is a thinly-scripted, flatly-directed feel-good movie about mothers organizing to do better for their children than Washington, D.C.’s school system. “Inspired by a true story,” it recounts the way a working class Washington mother figures out that the … Continue reading →

Bikers take over town to rob the bank. Marshal Guy Pearce isn’t having it.