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 →

Way back in olden times — mere months after Australia’s plot to destroy America was set in motion — I trekked to Hollywood for a holiday season chat with the folks who had this new horror film they were ready … 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 →

The only new movie to open wide this weekend, the sequel faith-based music drama “I Can Only Imagine 2,” did passable Thursday night numbers and a middling Friday and appears headed towards an $8 million opening weekend. The Sunday audience … 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 →