Categories for Movie Tv Reviews

“The Nightingale,” not to be confused with a 2019 gratuitously violent movie of the same title, was China’s Academy Award entry for 2014 best foreign film. This gentle film is a collaboration of the French director and writer, Philippe Muyl, and a Chinese cast, with other international contributions. It is an elegy of post-modern vices...

“Before We Go” has a familiar genre. A chance encounter between two strangers sparks a life-changing relationship. Sitting in Grand Central Station, Nick (Chris Evans, also the director) is a trumpeter practicing for an audition. He is also procrastinating in dropping by a party, knowing his ex-girlfriend will be there. He meets Brooke (Alice Eve),...

“Crazy Rich Asians,” based on Kevin Kwan’s novel and directed by Jon M. Chu, is billed as a romantic comedy with an all Asian cast. The story centers around a wedding – that family rite of passage that is filled with signs and wonders, hopes and dreams, love and future. But the  wonder-filled celebration cannot...

Seldom do I watch broadcast television shows. Their thin characters and formulaic plots dull the imagination. More critically, their cynical pretext that winces askance at traditional Judaic-Christian morality and their subtext of relative-individualism force a pernicious impertinence. But my wife and I do watch Madam Secretary and Blue Bloods. What I appreciate about the two...

Early in Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Cometh,” Larry Slade (David Morse) cynically quotes Heinrich Heine, the German poet: Lo, sleep is good, better is death – in sooth / The best of all were never to be born. If any voice that encapsulates this great American Tragedy*, it is this couplet. The four-act, almost...

“Like Someone In Love” is a lovely, lonely and laconic film. That its director is Iranian, Abbas Kiarostami, and its cast and setting are Japanese are confluence in this meditative and melancholy story. Poignant with few spoken words, this elegiac story laments that being in love may be more onerous than wondrous. Akiko (Rin Takanashi)...

The Only Living Boy In New York is a silly movie with serious aches and pains. The film finds its bathos from Simon and Garfunkel’s song of the same title. Simon wrote it when the duo was breaking up. The song’s anguish, sadness, disappointment, bewilderment, and finally, acceptance are the undercurrents that ripple through the...

 The creator, William Moulton Marston, of the comic hero, Wonder Woman, envisioned a female arch type that exhibits “force, strength and power.” Now that she is on the big screen, Wonder Woman’s powerful force and strength would rival that of Superman, Batman and Iron Man. A paraphrase of Greek mythology, she is from Themyscira, a...

It is a simple story. At a family gathering at grandma Helene’s (Edith Scob) charming country house outside of Paris, her three adult children and their spouses banter while her grandchildren play games. She is an animus and demanding woman. “These reunions exhaust me,” she complains. Frederic (Charles Berling), the oldest, is an economist and...

Up In The Air is about homelessness and our innate human desire to be home with family. Loosely based on Walter Kirn’s novel, the movie follows Ryan Binghan (George Clooney) crisscrossing the continent as a hired gun to fire employees whose employers are too timid to pull the trigger themselves. Ryan thrives on the road....