Mile-a-minute spieler Frank Stallone loves to reminisce, so much so that it’s a wonder that director/official Stallone videographer Derek Wayne Johnson’s (40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic) talking-heads doc clocks in at a scant 74 minutes. Frank’s greatest claim to fame is his ability to stand in …
The multiplex air conditioner pooped out halfway through, occasioning an early exit. Part of me was thrilled, but there’s this completist in me who hates not seeing a movie through to the end, particularly when the decision to leave was not my own. I should have thanked the gods of …
An offbeat grand tour that will take in landmarks and people connected to the producer's life. Directed by Mark Cousins.
Where were you on July 20, 1969? Unless you were among the thousands fortunate enough to have been in Mount Morris Park for the opening of the Harlem Cultural Festival, chances are you were glued to a television set witnessing another historical milestone: that was the Sunday on which man …
A technologically feasible portrait of conductor-free commuter trains and driverless cars warms us to a metaphysical conundrum: you're dying and wealthy enough to afford a clone to continue in your absence that’s so convincing, even your spouse won’t notice the difference. Would you do it? Set ‘neath overcast skies, the …
Flash reaction: Udo Kier. Preparing a gall-bladder kabob in Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein? How about Johnny Mnemonic’s seedy handler? There’s the criminally connected Friedrich in Dragged Across Concrete. This week adds real-life queer icon Pat Pitsenbarger, the man who put the Pride in the Pride of Sandusky, wasting away in …
The latest from star/producer Jason Momoa is howlingly enjoyable nonsense, a father/daughter actioner with a last minute twist that tries hard, but can’t quite explain away the previous 109 minutes of lunacy bookended by spectacular rooftop dives in the North Shore from high atop Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. Ray (Momoa) blames …
It’s not often one thinks of rabbis and their wives as amorous entities, but that’s the first thing you’ll notice when Moshe Yehuda (Jos Laniado) and his spouse Raquel (Judi Beecher) are introduced in mid-passionate embrace. (It's a family affair all around: Jos co-wrote the script with brother/co-star Claudio Laniado …
Director George Clooney hit a grand slam his first time at bat (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), then set the blandness bar high with Good Night, and Good Luck, and has gone down swinging ever since (The Monuments Men, The Ides of March). This steeped-in-sentimentality adaptation of newspaperman, novelist J.R. …
A corporate satire about the charismatic and manipulative owner of an industrial scales manufacturing business in a provincial Spanish town who is awaiting a visit by a committee that could give his company yet another award for business excellence. Obsessed with scoring the award, and against all odds, he tries …
For too long now, Angelina Jolie has dedicated herself to two types of product: well-intentioned shit (Beyond Borders, A Mighty Heart) and shit (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Wanted, Salt). Those Who Wish Me Dead earned a plot in the turd graveyard. Jolie stars as Hannah Faber, a flask-swilling smoke jumper …
When it comes to establishing a basic comic book universe, writer-director Ben Falcone can’t even manage to get the small details right, things like establishing an unfeigned menace from the get-go. With all the talk of legions of “Miscreants” overtaking Chicago, we never see more than three or four super-villains …
The decision to cast an African-American as the lead in the predominantly non-white Hamilton drew unanimous raves, but woke sleepyheads steered-clear of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights when its characters failed to pass the pigment test. His latest stars Andrew Garfield in a biopic based on the life of Rent …
It takes a bit for writer-director Nicole Beckwith to clue audiences in on the importance of the job interview that opens the picture. It’s also an audition of sorts, with Anna (Patti Harrison) trying out for the role of surrogate mother to successful app designer Matt’s (Ed Helms) single/surrogate dad …
Before TV animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera struck a Bedrock bonanza and turned cave people into animation's answer to The Honeymooners, they helmed a series of shorts at M-G-M that paired together the most durable team of cat and mouse to ever hit an animation stand. As a little …