Monthly Archives: October 2020

A WWII combat medic and Holocaust survivor meets a woman who left her combat vet husband in an otherwise empty New York bar in “The Second Sun,” a crushing bore of a screen romance starring one of writer Norman Mailer’s … Continue reading →

Of all the things necessary to make a screen thriller work, “urgency” has to rank at the top of the list. That’s conveyed via direction, editing, sometimes a pulse-pounding score, but most importantly in a script that expresses high stakes … Continue reading →

The father wants to get his kid into the exclusive Catholic school that will give his little boy the best chance at a brighter future. And it’s not going well. The admissions officer asks him a question in code. “What … Continue reading →

Screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick mainlined something universal with his script, “Final Destination.” A film that launched a franchise, it tapped into that teen tendency to feel immortal and the conspiracy buff in us all that likes to see “coincidences” as part … Continue reading →

What overwhelms you about David Lean’s second most famous Dickens adaptation is the sense of hunger that washes off the screen and erases any sense of “period piece” about it. “Oliver Twist” makes hunger so timeless that the 19th century … Continue reading →

Gina Gershon, as the empress of MMA fight promoters, and Elijah Baker as a desperate personal manager to a fighter needing a comeback are the two performers who merit the label “actors” in “Cagefighter: Worlds Collide,” a stupidly-plotted collection of … Continue reading →

It’s not utter madness to reset American novelist Jack London’s overtly political novel “Martin Eden” in the Red Epoch Italy of the 1960s. The title character (Luca Marinelli of TV’s “Trust”) rants about “individualism” and “socialism” and “capitalism” as a … Continue reading →

What a bizarre, loopy and over-the-top environmental justice drama “The Devil has a Name” is. It’s pitched like a fable, with vampy, larger-than-life villainy, outragous, out-in-the-open crimes and intimidation, a plucky “little man” hero and a crusading lawyer who has … Continue reading →

For film buffs, the short and acidic 1943 thriller “Journey Into Fear” is more fun for the argument it sets up than the 68 minutes presented on the screen. Orson Welles helped script it, took a beefy supporting role — … Continue reading →

Few movies grab the lonely, lost and timeless suck of freshman year at college as well as “Shithouse,” the debut feature of writer, director and co-star Cooper Raiff. It’s a sweet, sensitive and amusing run through what being a freshman … Continue reading →