By Elias Savada. If you’re not having your senses bludgeoned by The Northman, you’ll admire all the historical detail and period madness. Fire and brimstone meet rot and decay, yet there’s ambition afoot here.” The dark intensity that has imbued director-writer Robert Eggers first two directorial features has matured with […]
Out-Cageing Himself: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
By Elias Savada. Two-thirds broad comedy, one part chase film, it’s also a gimmick and an enjoyable bromance. Yeah, this is one nutty film. Its premise revolves around a famous actor named Nick Cage, played by the real Nicolas Cage. Two-thirds broad comedy, one part chase film, it’s not the […]
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore – Missed Opportunities
By Elias Savada. Doesn’t rise to the heights it could. It’s a case of middle child syndrome, or someone’s just tired.” Even a lesser rate Harry Potter spin-off such as Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore — the latest in J.K. Rowling’s post-Harry Potter series — should be enough for […]
Gaggle of Spies: Jean-Louis Roy’s The Unknown Man of Shandigor (Deaf Crocodile Films)
By Thomas Puhr. Contemporary audiences will hear Roy’s sardonic message loud and clear. Whether they’ll laugh or cry (or both) is a matter of taste.: “Swiss director Jean-Louis Roy’s long-lost mid-1960s Cold War super-spy thriller is a marvelous and surreal hall of mirrors, part-Dr. Strangelove, part-Alphaville,” reads the press release […]
Morbius: The Bad Taste of Bat Guano
By Elias Savada. A nonsensical Frankenstein/Dracula/Jekyll & Hyde mashup from Marvel.” There are not a lot of good things to say about the latest marginal Marvel character to hit the big screen, and plenty of bad ones. This sidebar effort — a nonsensical Frankenstein/Dracula/Jekyll & Hyde mashup — is from […]
A Onesie Doozie: Fun in The Lost City
By Elias Savada. A ridiculous, fun-filled romp about an illusion behind an illusion.” We’re overdue for some Sandra Bullock silliness. After her recent excursions in dramatic horror (Bird Box, 2018) and last year’s crime drama The Unforgivable, both direct-to-streaming on Netflix, she/we needed some big screen romantic comedy relief she […]
Trick and Treat: The Outfit Shines Brightly
By Elias Savada. Yes, there’s a theatrical cadence in the clever dialogue, but it’s such a highly original, suspenseful piece that it works magic as the characters move about their set.” Leonard Burling is a quiet, sad-eyed, precise, and observant man – an old-school, Savile Row cutter by trade, with […]
Embracing Multiplicity: Pushpendra Singh’s The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs (Laila Aur Satt Geet)
By Varsha Ramachandran. The pace, while slow, is steady, ensuring reflection without boredom, something to which the beautiful frames, colour combinations, and lilting score also contribute.” Director Pushpendra Singh’s second film adapting Rajasthani writer Vidaydan Detha’s works, The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs, which premiered at the 70th annual Berlinale, […]
Hard Times – Big Bad John: The John Milius Interviews
A Book Review by Matthew Sorrento. Oh, what can you do with a man like that?” John Cheever, “Goodbye My Brother” And what can we do with John Milius, a writer-director so stubbornly Right-wing in his views: do we urge viewers adamantly to embrace or to resist him? He’s undoubtedly […]
Worlds of Tiny Pain: On Laura Wandel’s Playground and Jay Rosenblatt’s When We Were Bullies
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Rosenblatt’s documentary is a frank self-assessment that resituates an otherwise easily forgotten misstep of youth in the context of the knowledge and experience of adulthood…. [while] When We Were Bullies strips away the soft surfaces of nostalgia to remind us with a near visceral intensity of the […]