Monthly Archives: May 2022

Movie Preview: Vanessa Redgrave lends gravitas to a distaff take on Neverland –“The Lost Girls”

Making Wendy a bigger deal in this story has been a thing for a decade or more. “The Lost Girls” promises to be the most Wendy centric version yet. June 17.

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Movie Review: The exquisite simplicity of “Petite Maman”

“Petite Maman” is a memory play for children, a children’s fantasy for grown-ups. The latest film from Céline Sciamma, who gave us the Oscar-winning “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” is an understated and distinctly adult look at childhood, death … Continue reading →

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Netflixable? “40-Love” stumbles in love and laughs, if not tennis

What a tin-eared foot-fault of a comedy “40-Love” is. Built around ineptly sketched-in characters not saved by the actors playing them, stumbling through scene after illogical and painfully-unfunny-but-meant-to-be-funny scenes, the number of actual laughs it produces you can count on … Continue reading →

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Movie Preview: Comic Jo Koy brings the Filipino-American giggles to “Easter Sunday”

Tiffany Haddish and Tia Carrere also star in this Koy-engineered August release. They say Lou Diamond Phillips is also in it. Not getting a “Fabulous Filipino Brothers” indie/working class and funny vibe from this. More upscale and contrived, as in … Continue reading →

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Classic Film Review: Gary Cooper’s transgressive-for-its-time “Return to Paradise” (1953)

Hollywood’s long affair with James A. Michener, the World War II Navy veteran whose “Tales of the South Pacific” launched a Pulitzer-prize winning literary career, began with a sort of proof-of-concept film. Long before the musical “South Pacific,” United Artists, … Continue reading →

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Movie Preview: Daniel Radcliffe is “Weird” in “The Al Yankovic Story”

If he didn’t learn to play the accordion as prep I’ll be very disappointed in “The Chosen One.” Very disappointed. Roku has this fall release, which is great news. EVERYbody’ll see it. Well, those of us who love free (with … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: Chinese-Americans find love comes and goes “In a New York Minute”

“In a New York Minute” is a film anthology that tells three loosely-connected stories about the female Chinese-American experience in New York. It’s a melodrama that traffics in diaspora generalizations that aren’t necessarily the most flattering, and whose messaging and … Continue reading →

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Movie Preview: Nostalgic Game Night goes all bloody and Jumanji when the game is “Gatlopp”

June 16, it’s your turn to “Go to hell.”

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Netflixable? Premature Blandness, the curse of “40 Years Young”

The Mexican “40 Years Young (Cuarentones)” is a midlife crisis romantic dramedy that’s so slow that I had to check to make sure Netflix wasn’t experiencing screen-freeze. Its 81 drab minutes pass by like a long, labored comic death rattle. … Continue reading →

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Movie Preview: Brits are haunted by the “Hollow”

Hard to get a bead on exactly what’s happening in this creepy trailer to a May 17 release. Haunted place? Haunted people? An older woman with Alzheimer’s is hunted by a horror in Herefordshire. Always alliterate.

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