Monthly Archives: November 2022

“Darkling” is a grimly disturbing drama about grief, psychotic stubbornness and paranoia set in the murderous ethnic strife of the 1990s Bosnian War. A Serbian farmer (Slavko Stivac) is hole- up on his rural Kosovo farm, barring the doors and … Continue reading →

Hollywood turned serial killers into urbane sophisticates, monsters who appreciate a good “chianti” with their murders, or geniuses who enjoy making a “game” out of their crimes to toy with the cops. Fact — most serial killers, the vast majority … Continue reading →

Any rom-com with “Christmas” in the title is bound by law to have a stale whiff of “Hallmark” about it, and Netflix hasn’t been shy about trying to grab that audience. So any cute or touching moments in “Christmas With … Continue reading →

One of the first movie-going memories from my childhood was my parents taking me to see “A Shot in the Dark,” probably at our small town drive-in, because in that corner of Virginia, the downtown cinema never stayed open for … Continue reading →

One of the best animated efforts by Netflix this year isn’t for kids. Not very young ones anyway. “Entergalactic,” inspired by and paired with Kid Cudi’s latest album, didn’t even need to be animated. It’s an utterly conventional young Black … Continue reading →

Sometimes, it seems to me that what we’ve labeled “Westerns” in fiction and on film or TV over the generations really should have been called “Southwesterns.” Because that’s the geography that became iconic in the genre. The combination of arid, … Continue reading →

The first thing that pops out of “Devotion,” the new Korean War Naval aviators action biopic, is how far digitall- animated aircraft and aerial combat have come since the first films to lean heavily on that technology — “Flyboys” and … Continue reading →

You take the cute with the not-nearly-so-cute in the Swedish rom-com “Off Track,” titled “Ur spår” in ABBAland. It’s about a coupling or two, and people destined to bump into each other at the annual cross country Swedish ski race, … Continue reading →

Twenty years after its release, it’s about time to acknowledge what has been obvious since the day it came out. Once upon a time, Peter Hedges, Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Derek Luke, Oliver Platt, Isaiah Whitlock Jr. and Sean Hayes … Continue reading →

An iconic haute couture footwear brand’s origin story is told in sometimes inspiring strokes in “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams,” Luca Guadagnino’s story of the life and work of Salvatore Ferragamo. Fashionistas, fashion historians, film historians, modern shoe icon Manolo Blahnik, … Continue reading →