Monthly Archives: November 2023

“Poor Things” is a deliriously deranged comedy about one woman’s journey from suicidal despair to liberation, thanks to her discovery of the orgasmic pleasures of “furious jumping,” aka “sexual intercourse” done right. Yorgos Lanthimos, the most successful and mainstream avante … Continue reading →

Director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti go “home” for the holidays with the warm, acerbic but sentimental “The Holdovers,” a picture that hits a lot of the same notes of their greatest collaboration, “Sideways.” It’s a sweet but slight … Continue reading →

More emotions, because you knew Pixar wasn’t going to let go of an idea this good.

“Forever Young” is yet another “speculative fiction” tale that takes senior citizens for a dainty dip in the Fountain of Youth. It’s a somber, downbeat drama in which the familiar themes about how old age is “earned” and how some … Continue reading →

He wakes up in his underwear, trapped in a modernist but spare cell with track lighting, a computer terminal, a sink, a toilet and a lot of questions, one of which matters most of all. “What’s going on?” It’s not … Continue reading →

Apple TV+ has this companion piece to “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” Austin Butler and Barry Keough star in this story of the air we over Europe, bombers and fighters and “milk runs” and “suicide missions.” Whatever practical effects … Continue reading →

Open one’s mind to the possibilities and the possible interpretations of Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest. Emma and Willem and Ruffalo and Ramy are the stars. An infamous but much praised sex scene is it’s buzz right now. Dec. 8 this comes … Continue reading →

He was all but “erased” from the history of the famous 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” of 1963, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. took center stage as America’s greatest orator and the Conscience of the … Continue reading →

The effortlessly cool actor and jazz pianist Jeff Goldblum becomes literally animated for the Fernando Trueba doc about the late ’50s Bossa Nova craze, the world’s love affair with Brazilian music and a seminal figure in that movement whose life … Continue reading →

A couple of hard and fast rules of the cinema are proven again in “Adventures of the Naked Umbrella,” a dark screwball conspiracy thriller set along California’s wildly eccentric Salton Sea “coast.” One rule says you should never ever set … Continue reading →