Monthly Archives: March 2024

Actress, artist, model and ’60s “It” girl, the most famous guise Anita Pallenberg appeared under was “muse.” She was linked to a lot of people who considered her thus, as she came to embody the mod, swinging “La Dolce Vita” … Continue reading →

The cast is good, the action beats solid and the explosions are epic in the latest French updating of an all-time action classic, “The Wages of Fear.” But almost everything else about this version ranges from “inferior” to “clumsy” to … Continue reading →

If there’s one myth that dies the hardest about the comedian, writer, dancer, banjo virtuoso and art collector Steve Martin, it’s that he’s “unknowable.” Shy, “very private,” soft-spoken and guarded in interviews that aren’t chat show performances, he’s let that … Continue reading →

The nonsense slides by like lava on a wintry day in “Godzilla v. Kong: The New Empire,” a cheerfully stupid “kaiju” movie that isn’t as interesting as the licensing agreements that put a Hollywood creature feature creation on screen with … Continue reading →

Maverick filmmaker Nicholas Ray was well on his way to “Johnny Guitar,” “Rebel Without A Cause”and “Bigger than Life” when he followed up his big Bogart break “A Lonely Place” with “On Dangerous Ground,” an intense troubled cop thriller with … Continue reading →

It often seems, on a personal as well as cultural level, that the F-bomb has lost all power to shock. And then a comedy comes along to remind us of the colorful ugliness and delicacy of language and how it … Continue reading →

“The Talk of the Town” is a lightly-amusing, mildly-suspenseful, engagingly-acted and solidly-constructed comic melodrama, a pleasant enough time-killer from director George Stevens and featuring a rogueish Cary Grant, a charming and plucky Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman at his most … Continue reading →

Film critics are like baseball umpires. Right and wrong are relative, so “consistency” is what matters. If I panned the original “Top Gun,” kicked its sequel “Maverick” and torched the Chinese knockoff “Born to Fly,” it’s not as if I’m … Continue reading →

Max Patkin had been “The Clown Prince of Baseball” for 40 years before “Bull Durham” came along and preserved his act for all time. Writer-director Ron Shelton, a former minor league infielder, remembers basically building his Kevin Costner/Susan Sarandon/Tim Robbins … Continue reading →

A wary unease hangs over “Shayda,” the debut feature film of Iranian-born filmmaker Noora Niasari. In simplest terms, it’s a domestic melodrama, a story of a custody fight against the Islamic patriarchy of fundamentalist Iran. But what the viewer absorbs … Continue reading →