Monthly Archives: February 2026

The little girl repeats her grandmother’s directions as she writes down the recipe. “Three eggs for fertility,” she says. “One kilo of fliur for life. Five hundred grams of sugar for a sweet life. And baking powder…for a fluffy cake.” … Continue reading →

Flashes of anarchic wit and the odd zinger or sight gag brighten up “Operation Taco Gary’s,” an indie sci-fi farce in the tradition of “Safety Not Guaranteed” that plays like a redneck “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The debut feature … Continue reading →

Priyanka Chopra Jonas furies through fight choreography and Karl Urban makes a worthy villain even if all the CGI in the world can’t make Australia look like “the Caribbean” in the the brutish, humorless pirate picture “The Bluffs.” Co-writers Joe … Continue reading →

Impressive stunts, car chases and crashes and creative ways of killing compete with a laughable collection of cute action “comedy” cliches in the French thriller “The Orphans” (“Les orphelins”). It’s essentially an Alban Lenoir/ Dali Benssalah “buddy” picture in the … Continue reading →

The great Irish character actor Brendan Gleeson was a mere lad — a slip of a thing — when he “burst” on the cinema scene in the mid-’90s. Ah, who’re we kidding? He was a great, grand and jolly galoot … Continue reading →

If you’re hell-bent on seeing at least one cast away samurai fights off 13th century cannibals this year, you might as well make it “Lone Samurai.” Writer-director Josh C. Waller’s action picture has polished production values, striking locations and a … Continue reading →

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville’s breakthrough film, “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” gave voice to those in the shadows of pop music, the backup singers who made good records great in the ’60s and ’70s. He’d been making music docs for over … Continue reading →

It comes as no surprise that the debut feature film of Werner Herzog had madness as its overarching theme. The half a century (and counting) of films that followed 1968’s “Signs of Life” would almost to a one show somebody … Continue reading →

Just when you think you’ve got a performer all figured out, they go out and surprise you with a sweet and sentimental story of love and loss and dogs. Margaret Cho built her career on identity comedy — life as … Continue reading →

The first time I read the phrase “an actor’s actor” about the great Robert Duvall was in the first issue of “American Film” magazine that I subscribed, way back in the Dark Ages when there magazines. It’s not as though … Continue reading →