Cinemascoping

Riding a wave of positive buzz provided by the many film festivals where it was greeted with numerous accolades, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight arrives in theaters with the onus of not only having to live up to the hype but also breaking a losing streak where independent features are concerned.  Thankfully, the movie delivers all we’ve […]

When you have a formula that works, you don’t tinker with it.  Kentucky Fried Chicken knows this, Mercedes-Benz knows this and Disney knows this. It would be hard to calculate just how many billions the corporation has earned on its princess movies and the ancillary products it sells because of them. The youngsters these films […]

Like many an awkward teenager, Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen takes one step forward and two steps back during much of its development, stumbling here, righting itself there before coming to a satisfying, albeit, hard-won conclusion.  Like many of its characters, the film has nothing but the best of intentions in telling its […]

There’s no shortage of talent where Greg Mottola’s Keeping Up with the Joneses is concerned, a would-be comedy romp that never really generates enough laughs, or rompiness for that matter.  This is one of those films that looks great on paper, surely went into production with the highest of expectations and inexplicably lays before the […]

Incendiary, problematic and arresting, Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation is the hot-button film of the moment, an unflinching look at the vagaries of slavery and its echoes through the generations.  Focusing on a slave rebellion of 1831 led by the radical slave Nat Turner, the movie employs a slow-burn approach as we see […]

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a semi-submersible offshore oil drilling rig suffered a catastrophic disaster when high pressure sent thousands of gallons of oil into the air when a system of blowout preventers failed to ease or staunch the flow of the petroleum from beneath the surface of the ocean bed off the […]

For some inexplicable reason, director Adam Wingard has gained the reputation of being some sort of horror craftsman among aficionados of the genre.  Based on his previous work (V/H/S, You’re Next, and others), this can only mean that the standards of modern fright-film fans have fallen very low indeed.  A master of confusion rather than […]

As with most of Oliver Stone’s fact-based movies, Snowden is a work that needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  Fascinating and frightening, the film sets out to give the title character’s point of view concerning his reasons for having released over 1.5 million documents he stole from the CIA and other government […]

The antecedents to Luke Scott’s “Morgan” are many – Frankenstein, A.I., Lucy, Ex Machina – so much so that we should simply regard this movie as yet another variation on the artificial life vs. human beings theme. Truth be told, there’s little new at play here and this latest entry suffers from being released in such close proximity […]

Where The Light Between Oceans is concerned, you have to give director Derek Cianfrance and his cast credit – they’re fully committed to making the audience weep and will go to any length to make this happen.  Unabashedly romantic, this adaptation of the novel by M.L. Stedman ticks off every element on the list of […]

Poignantly told and beautifully rendered, Travis Knight’s Kubo and the Two Strings may be the most striking film in a landmark year for movie animation.  Containing elements from Japanese folklore, the screenplay by Marc Haimes and Chris Butler is modeled after the classic hero’s journey as it chronicles a damaged boy’s efforts to reclaim a […]

Surprisingly engaging, Richard Tanne’s Southside with You recounts the fateful first date between Barack Obama and his future wife Michelle Robinson, which occurred on one very long afternoon and evening in 1989.  On the surface, this would seem a project with limited appeal, and surely a very narrow audience.  However, one of the film’s surprises […]