Monthly Archives: March 2024

“Poor Things” and “The Favourite” director Yorgos Lanthimos has found a rep company that works, so Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe are back for this next outing, joined by Margaret Qualley and Jesse Plemons, Hong Chou. I heartily approve of … 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 →

The Crockett Johnson novel makes the journey to the big screen with Zachary Levi in the title role, Zooey Deschanel, Lil Rel Howery, Jemaine Clement and Alfred Molina. The kid-simple gimmick is that anything Harold draws can come to life. … Continue reading →

A noteworthy political life gets lost in its details in “Shirley,” a Netflix bio-pic about the first African American Congresswoman and first African American woman to run for president, Shirley Chisholm. Veteran TV director (“Barbershop,””Guerilla”) and novelist John Ridley landed … Continue reading →

For about 45 minutes — roughly the length of the first act — Jake Gyllenhaal and “Edge of Tomorrow/Fair Game/American Made” director Doug Liman let us know that whatever the glories of Patrick Swayze’s crowd-pleasing bouncer dramedy, their version of … Continue reading →

The Big Anime Eyes of Anya Taylor-Joy take over this trailer to what looks like another epic in the string of epics Aussie George Miller has made — going back about 40 years — on the same subject. A post-World … Continue reading →