Pain Hustlers It could be easier to write about “Pain Hustlers” if it were either really good or really bad. But no, what we have here is a tedious film by director David Yates who tries to tell a story of an ambitious single mom named Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) whose marketing tactics led to […]
Priscilla Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker of her own whose movies are all about captivity and isolation, one way or another. In the case of the characters held captive, it’s often a gilded cage, and the cage looking for a bird (as Kafka put it) in “Priscilla” is Elvis Presley. The King met Priscilla Beaulieu
Maharaja When movies blow up on social media, I like to take a wait and see approach. Generally, I let the initial excitement die down before watching it myself. But Maharaja was different. One of my friends asked me to watch it at midnight, and then another asked me to check it out in the
Treasure Lily Brett, a novelist and essayist from Australia, often writes about the Holocaust as she is the daughter of survivors herself. Her 2001 novel Too Many Men tells the story of a father and daughter who travel to Poland in order for the father to confront his tragic past. The girl meets with what
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes What is it about Elizabeth Taylor? Her work caught my fancy, I think, with the Zeffirelli Shakespeare “The Taming of the Shrew” and the Nichols Albee “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” both with then husband Richard Burton. And then also I must have seen her in some of the “Father
A Different Man Here we are, three weeks into January, and the Sundance Film Festival has delivered what promises to be the year’s most uncomfortable date movie, a grubby New York set fable about a facially distinctive actor (modeled on Adam Pearson) who undergoes an experimental procedure that leaves him looking like Sebastian Stan presumably
Leo “Leo,” an Indian remake of “A History of Violence” that is both formulaic and satisfying, is and isn’t what it seems. If you’re expecting a loud, bloody, bass-heavy action musical about a coffee-shop owner defending his wife and kids from a paranoid drug dealer who insists our family man is really a violent ex-gangster
The Pope’s Exorcist In his original review of “The Exorcist” from 1973, Roger Ebert wrote about “the absolute rightness” of casting the older priest who battles evil opposite the demonically possessed child with Max von Sydow, a great character actor. “He has been through so many religious and metaphysical crises in Ingmar Bergman’s films that
Firebrand “Alicia Vikander plays the titular “Firebrand” as Katherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of Henry VIII. But its representation of her as a free-thinking, vengeful radical is only occasionally fiery in itself. The show is actually stolen by Jude Law as the corpulent, capricious king. Every time he’s on screen, Karim Aïnouz’s film
Extraction II The “Extraction” movies, overseen and co-conceived by the Marvel affiliated Russo brothers, are a dying breed among films of this size big budget, super violent adventures. Whether his name is John Rambo or Jason Bourne or John Wick, he’s a variation on a theme the prodigious killer who would rather not kill anymore
