The Little Things, the new thriller from writer-director John Lee Hancock, is set in 1990. Except for the narrative convenience of removing cellphones as an everyday tool for the law enforcement personnel, there’s no obvious reason to have this scenario … Continue reading Now Playing — The Little Things
I remember being on airplane watching a parent in the seat attempt to keep their kid occupied by dialing up the R-rated DC animation adaptation of the seminal nineteen-eighties graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, presumably under the belief that … Continue reading Sundance 2021 — Part 4
In the festival introduction to his feature I Was a Simple Man, director Christopher Makoto Yogi inviting the audience to visit Hawai‘i for a couple hours. That struck me as an amusing, diversionary way to introduce what looked to be … Continue reading Sundance 2021 — Part 3
Part of experiencing Sundance only vicariously in previous years was having my curiosity piqued about films being positioned as contender in Academy Awards categories for a ceremony over a year out. It’s blissfully odd to instead actually view and assess … Continue reading Sundance 2021 — Part 2
When Steven Soderbergh picked up the first ever Audience Award for a narrative film at the Sundance Film Festival, in 1989, everything changed. Soderbergh’s film, sex, lies, and videotape, went on to be an arthouse sensation, and Sundance was suddenly … Continue reading Sundance 2021 — Part 1
#52 — Haley Lu Richardson as Casey in Columbus (Kogonada, 2017) In Columbus, Haley Lu Richardson plays a young woman waiting for her life to start. Intelligent and engaged in the world around her, Casey is about one year out … Continue reading Greatish Performances #52
Crossing Delancey (Joan Micklin Silver, 1988). This gentle romantic comedy has the wafting charm of a fable. Isabelle (Amy Irving) is an independent New Yorker with a habit of dabbling with the wrong men. When her grandmother (Reizl Bozyk) enlists … Continue reading Then Playing — Crossing Delancey; The Climb; Don’t Let Go
Four men gather at the edge of a nation that simultaneously exalts and oppresses them. They are famous, and at least a couple of them are generously compensated for the actions that earned them notoriety. They also are confined to … Continue reading Now Playing — One Night in Miami
Promising Young Woman is a gleaming arsenic lollipop with a razor blade hidden in the middle. It’s enticing and delicious but it also induces queasy wooziness, and then, with the barest warning, it cuts deep. The film is merciless and … Continue reading Now Playing — Promising Young Woman
Driveways (Andrew Ahn, 2020). There are few stories of bonding more cliched than the sad, lonely child who befriends a crusty elderly fellow, both growing in charming and moving ways because of the relationship. That makes it borderline miraculous that … Continue reading Then Playing — Driveways; Babyteeth; Collective
