Daily Archives: June 18, 2021

“Gaia” is a South African trapped-in-the-forest thriller that trips up expectations more than enough to keep us interested. It’s an eco-horror tale where who and what we root for and against are flipped and flipped again as the story tales … Continue reading →

Kevin Hart waters down his ill-tempered, bug-eyed “little man with a foul mouth” shtick for “Fatherhood,” a perfectly-pleasant if predictable and right-on-the-cusp-of-maudlin single parent dramedy. Hey, that’s what happens when you team any edgy (OK, “edge-adjacent”) leading man with Paul … Continue reading →

Say what you like about “Lord of the Flies” and its many, many screen (and literary) imitations over the decades. That story, about the savagery barely civilized out of our young, even and especially the “well born” among them, still … Continue reading →

The stately, intimate and pictorially perfect “Center Stage” was Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan’s “Citizen Kane” styled experiment in screen biography. He set out to tell the tragic story of a legend of early Chinese cinema, a starlet whose beauty … Continue reading →

The Hollywood shorthand we remember as “high concept,” a “pitch” you could squeeze into a single sentence, reached its zenith in the 1980s. As SOME of us never gave it up, let’s trot it out to describe Apple’s new ’80s … Continue reading →