Yearly Archives: 2023

Imagine The Three Stooges cast in a Monty Python movie with a Marvel budget. That’s “Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom,” a pricey, large-scale, seriously-silly slapstick farce from our wine-swilling/snail-eating friends across the pond. It’s utterly ahistorical and pretty danged … Continue reading →

Years ago, a troubled Chilean woman strapped her legs onto her motorbike and drove it into the Rio Cruces. Now, as the river suffers through another man-made fish kill, as the bees are dying off and environmental protests spread, she … Continue reading →

Letitia Wright faces off with Jeffrey Donovan and Jamie Bell in this post-Civil War Western. The last film of Michael Kenneth Williams looks worth tracking down when it comes out in June.

What’s the difference between a Polish exorcism movie, and every other exorcism movie you’ve ever seen? In Poland, the priests and monks summon Satan so’s he can take over and begin his cloven-hoofed reign. “Hellhole” is a Polish exorcism thriller … Continue reading →

Actor (“Little Women,” “Rifkin’s Festival”) and sometime director (“A Faithful Man”) Louis Garrel manages some seriously deft misdirections in his droll, dark comedy “L’Innocent” (“The Innocent”). It’s a tale of love and grief, guilt and prison and ACTING, all folded … Continue reading →

A twenty year old franchise that has been on cruise control, more or less, for a decade, appears to have hit a wall. “Fast X,” coming just a couple of years after the previous “Fast and the Furious” film, following … Continue reading →

Well damn, I did not see this coming. The best film in ages about coming to grips with “fluid” gender issues so dominating film, TV and other media these days is smart, reassuringly sweet and Polish. I dare say you … Continue reading →

The mere presence of Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a Manhattan movie creates expectations even though we’re decades-removed from her “Seinfeld” stardom. But this time she’s working for that indie icon Nicole Holofcener, a writer and director known for intimate and sometimes … Continue reading →

An elderly man walks into the frame and sits on a park bench, a ritual repeated tens of millions of times every much day pretty everywhere in the world. This little old man with a Spanish accent isn’t talking about … Continue reading →

Granted, it is a post World War I story, the tail end of “the closing of the West” era. But this October Awards Season release has Oscar winners and an epic look and an “erased” history subject. DiCaprio and De … Continue reading →