Monthly Archives: July 2020

  It’s not so much a rule, as an understanding — an agreement between filmmaker and audience. If your comedy or rom-com is only 80 or so minutes long, you’ve got to give us something to laugh or at least … Continue reading →

    The amorality that is obvious about Tomasz Giemza, from the first moment we meet him, had to have set in years before. He’s still young and in college — law school, no less. But the plagiarism which gets … Continue reading →

Was writer-director Miranda July at least “inspired” by the Oscar nominated Japanese drama “Shoplifters?” She’s not saying. But “Kajillionaire,” more a dramedy — colorfully comic con artists, until their “daughter” figures out she’s being used — than a drama, certainly … Continue reading →

When it hits Amy, it arrives in a rush. She jams Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief” into a single night, at most just hours. Amy (Katie Lyn Sheil) will blast through “denial” and “bargaining” and go straight to … Continue reading →

The new Epix series “Helter Skelter: An American Myth,” weaves its story out of the culture’s collective memory of LA’s infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, committed by drug-addled cultists in the thrall of Charles Manson. In half a dozen episodes, documentarian Lesley … Continue reading →

Gleeson? Uncanny Showtime is tossing this movie Molotov cocktail at the traitor and his self righteous and clumsy GOP FBI chief right before the election.

You’ve seen Tom Bower in scores of films over the years, brief appearances that leave a mark in “Die Hard 2,” “Light of My Life” or the “Breaking Bad” movie — “El Camino.” Parked front and center in an indie … Continue reading →

Oh, the mischief movie-makers get up to when they forego trimming their scripts and editing their films to a running time that their story can sustain. When you title your movie “Romance Doll,” and build it around a Japanese artist … Continue reading →

They’ve had to delay and delay, and then reduce their scope and cut capacity at the one theater, the Enzian, that they’ll be showing films in for this year’s Florida Film Festival. You know why. But a lot of their … Continue reading →

The favorite writer of the “let’s slum it” reading set, Charles Bukowski, has been the subject of many docs and appreciations. Aug 7, here’s another. His gritty, working class/drinking class novels were rarely adapted to film, but “Barfly” and “Factotum” … Continue reading →