Monthly Archives: December 2020

Warners is moving its entire 2021 film lineup, big titles all, to a theatrical and HBO Max simultaneous release schedule. Pandemic or not, will anybody go out to a theater if they can watch new releases at home? Not likely. … Continue reading →

Having trouble sleeping? Here’s a maudlin Filipino melodrama set mostly in Morocco that has scenery and very little else going for it save for the promise of a nap it prompts. Flat performances, feeble attempts at humor, heartless grabs at … Continue reading →

“Billie” is the far and away the most definitive Billie Holiday biography ever put on screen, a film that celebrates her magic and examines the demons that haunted her, chemical and human. It’s a film built out of two tragedies, … Continue reading →

The generic nature of international pop songs, pop stars and “American Idol” TV shows is the been-there/voted-him-out subtext of “Fierce,” a Polish dramedy about a teen who competes in a singing competition to get back at the father who ran … Continue reading →

British theater cinema of the 1950s was famed for its “kitchen sink” realism, working class movies that showed how people really lived . “Look Back in Anger” and “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and the like set their stories against … Continue reading →

Get a load of that image above. That’s Ryan Phillippe as a Delta Force commando, shooting, punching and brawling his way to the rescue of his son, and that Supreme Court Justice’s daughter the kid crushes on — kidnapped as … Continue reading →

A drama about a Guantanamo prisoner, this Feb. release also stars Zachary Levi.

Actors are always encouraged to “make work for yourself” — start a theater group, put on shows, write a story with a plum part in it for yourself. So there’s no such thing as a “vanity project” in that world, … Continue reading →

Argentina’s troubled past is the backdrop of a lifelong personal connection to “The German Friend,” a romantic drama from Argentine filmmaker Jeanine Meerapfel. It’s about a Jewish girl who becomes infatuated with her new neighbor in 1940s Buenos Aires, a … Continue reading →

A romantic comedy built around these two seems…dicey. He has no screen presence and she’s yet to prove she’s more than a pair of model’s eyebrows. But here we go.