Monthly Archives: August 2020

A late August release, a ’70s Aussie feminist icon brought back to life. Hey, we had the Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs biopic, why not Helen?

You pick up on a big drawback to the Seth Rogen comedy “An American Pickle” the first time he shows up in two guises on the screen. Here’s a movie that abandons most everything that makes Rogen special in its … Continue reading →

You can’t blame screenwriter turned writer-director David Ayer for going back to his greatest hit whenever he’s in a pinch. Hell, Howard Hawks wasn’t shy about repeating himself, again and again. Ayer wrote “Training Day.” “End of Watch,” “Harsh Times,” … Continue reading →

“Waiting for the Barbarians” is a dusty, grim colonialism fable based on a novel by the South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. The “waiting” ostensibly is the comeuppance facing an unnamed “empire” whose brutal high-handedness will lead to a … Continue reading →

Eddie Izzard headlines this “anarchic” Scottish comedy. Looks loopy enough. See it Aug 28.

We never know what we’ll be able to brush off or force ourselves to forget and what will eat at us until our dying day. We can’t even know, as Dickens’ David Copperfield mused, “Whether I’ll be the hero of  … Continue reading →

Only decades of affection for the wonderful Mexican actor Diego Luna‘s screen performances and a recognition of “Well, his heart’s in the right place” can temper the tone of any review of his new chat show/series for Amazon, “Pan y … Continue reading →

Stark, poetic and somewhat frustrating, “Song Without a Name (Canción sin nombre)” patiently weaves together several story threads to capture what life was like during Peru’s 1980s collapse. It was, as headlines show us, a country awash in corruption and … Continue reading →

It was the late 1980s when the idea folks at Walt Disney Animation had their first meeting with the man who was to bring Disney Animation back from the dead. After an insistent courtship by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mr. “Little Shop … Continue reading →

Bert Stern only directed one documentary. But “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is widely considered the greatest jazz performance documentary ever, a 1959 classic that was designated to be preserved as part of the Smithsonian’s National Film Registry. The film, … Continue reading →