I always believed until long after my mother died that she was the onlyperson who loved meand thatmy father was a shriveled man at heart.Once my mother fell hard on the floorand he never bothered to lift her up orgive …
Category: movies
Son of Monarchs
The monarch flutters above the ash and in its black and orange beautyexists all day and night. It flies up to meet the sun,the gentle maternal hand of life lived in the light.Only the scent of milkweedlures it down to …
America: The Motion Picture- Doesn’t Let Alternate Facts Get in the Way of Its Own Inane History Lesson.
When filmmakers fall asleep and flunk high school American History, America: The Motion Picture is what’s created years later- an animated, anarchic, free association lunacy that mixes up the American Revolution with the Civil War and shows that it respects …
The Projection Room
If lucky I will die in a room of non-hospital green, on plump pillows, good linens, with good family and good friends,the ghosts of loves, the odoramaof nitrate seas, forests or mountains on walls.Room where well-cast dreams lived and died. …
The Dig
Blow the dust of history off our bones. In the excavated ribs of ancient sailing shipsfind the burial chambers of kings. Blow the dust of history off our bones.In the dig just below them, but just over the rubble of …
Where Waldo Is Not
The greatest where’s Waldo paintings to be have him the tiniest spot at the very top in a population of near clones. After searching everywhere he will be the last thing you’ll find, the last thing you’ll see. …
A Gun and a Hotel Bible
No bad guy talks alone to a Bible in a hotel room with a gun in his hand. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put …
Wolfwalkers
The town exists in harsh geometry, the forest— a fiery flow. The wolf leaps above their soul, a crescent moon. Run the wolf. Flee the wolf. Don’t go beyond the wall lest you be devoured. When …
Small Axe: Lovers Rock
The music is the scent in the air that changes everything. “I’ve got no time to lie, I’ve got no time to play your silly games,” it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt pairing off the lovers from the …
Identifying Features
My mother wanted me to go away. I hardly sent her anything. From behind, we all look alike. Read More "Identifying Features"
Small Axe: Mangrove
All you wicked men what is wrong with you? There is no black Justice seen on the Sistine Chapel. Only the stupidities that can make a stuff bird laugh- the small axe ready to cut the …
The Art of Dying
The Pandemic has closed the theaters and cinemas. On stage a lone actor commits suicide in the loneliness. On screen the two lovers run to each other against the march of soldiers. The actor’s death is an …
Seeing Jaws Again
Her name you may or may not recall. It was Chrissie, the body in the sand dune. You do remember the shark, the blood on the water, death spreading like a virus in the town of Amity. You …
Max von Sydow Made Me Believe
When he cried on the cross he made me believe in Jesus. When he blessed a devil child he made me believe in His Word. When he mated death he made me believe in the light. When …
Onward- to the Rediscovered Realm
In a realm of two moons and three suns not afraid to be besieged by everlasting brightness, where everyone speaks from their heart spires and devils and scorpions cavort with sprites, magic coexisted with every day miracles. People would cross …
The Call of the Wild
What does a dog know of being a wolf, a wolf know of being a dog? The wolf howls not to understand the moon but to know itself in the community of nature, to shout out its place …
Gretel and Hansel Get Parental Advice
We tell our children not to wander in the woods, never to stop or enter the cottage with the peppermint scent and gingerbread façade for a naked witch is sleeping inside. Beware the milk weeping from an axe handle …
Underwater
I am Jonah in the belly of Leviathan living only when the beast surfaces, exchanging liquid grief, heavy air for the unwanted gasps of new life. I pray out of this belly for gills and only the ocean hears …
The Song of Names
It was chanted for five Sabbaths in a row in the small synagogue with the charred bimah, ashes staining the tzitzits of the rebbe’s tallit, as he raised his arms above his head, closed his eyes and sang the first …
Just Mercy
Southern justice is the snake that slithers up the tree before the buzz of the lumberjack’s saw, the duck of the head to fit it into the squad car, the dark voice singing in a dark cell put on death …
The Hand
Every cut is a bleeding thorn, every breath is a spread of fingers. The ear records all its silences. - Lose a hand and it goes to the trash heap, lose an ear and everyone will think of Van Gogh. …
The Two Popes
For some God comes in silence and for others it’s a saxophone solo. He’s the confession a lonely parish priest has waited all day to see and hear after lattice hours of watching smoke blow down like Cain’s rejected offering. …
Yoda Siths the Universe for the Rise of Skywalker
The force is another Jedi mind trick that convinces the soul that all that is Sith is not necessarily sin but the whining of a baby Yoda aware of his Death Star. Read More "Yoda Siths the Universe for the …
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Honey Boy
We carry our fathers on our backs, honey boys to their joys and violence, absorbing their frustrations in memory or dispersing their cries into indifferent winds. Our hearts listen for the end of the cycle powerless to the mind …
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Mr. Rogers grace exists in miniature cities of kindness, - the tranquil tones of forgiveness, level to the eye of a single frighten child. - For him, and in that moment, that child is the most precious thing in the …
Knives Out
Let the black dogs run wild, sharpen the knives for some real back stabbing, roundup the usual suspects, the mystery is about to begin. - The cardigan teen with his nose buried in his iPhone- he’s a suspect- murderous thoughts …
Cop Movie or 21 Bridges
Those who tread the thin blue line knows it follows through their lineage. - Strong boys become men, then become cops. The rest become robbers, the devil that stares them in the eye for the rest of their life. - …
The Good Liar
It’s hard to tell the lies of impression, the little bits of puffery that makes one look good in the eyes of a would be admirer. - One may say their name with a French flair. Betty becomes Bette. Roy …
I See Celluloid Angels and Not One of Them Is Charlie’s
Every Angel Second Class jumps into the river of George Bailey’s despair, and after being rescued shows everything that never should have existed, everything that was, everything that could be contained in the Odbody of his inner existence, the baptism, …
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Your First Mustang or Ford vs Ferrari (A Movie Poem)
Everything is a continuous white line that goes on forever to the horizon where the next dream is always ahead. - Just you and the mustang a body and a machine moving through space and time. - Drive like you …
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Making It- Midway (A Movie Poem)
Stella remembers when the Zeros flew thru her backyard and she saw Pearl Harbor in flames, blue bodies bouncing on the waves. - Afterward, welders melted the steel of capsized destroyers hoping to rescue any upside down survivors. - Her …
The Shining 2 or Doctor Sleep (A Movie Poem)
The earlier horror leaves DT a broken drunken man building smaller worlds within worlds, boxes within boxes, memories within smaller memories to keep the monsters from eating the shining he has left. - He is forever moving to the same …
Film Noir or Motherless Brooklyn (A Movie Poem)
In the rear view mirror he can see the specters.. - her upside down reflection scatter when a foot hits the puddle… - hear the notes of a trumpet solo popping thru the open red door of a jazz club… …
Harriet (A Movie Poem)
1. The biggest tree exists to neither swing nor sway, doesn’t wait for a strong wind to emancipate it from roots, to be turned into freedom papers to be torn up by the master. - The swing was created by …
The Singularity or Terminator: Dark Fate (A Movie Poem)
The machine that replaces you and the one that ascends you will fight it out on the factory floor. - Ultimately, it’s another machine, the gun, that will save you from a lethal precision that can cut flies in midair. …
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Okay
“Are you okay?”, my wife asks when I cough. - “No. I’m fine. Yes. I’m not”, I respond, - stumping her in the poetic irony of words that - encompass the yes and no and the in between. - She …
The Lighthouse (A Movie Poem)
Doldrums, doldrums eviler than the devil. - The Cyclopes’ prism eye revolves around me in a mechanical chatter. - It calls out desires at night, a mermaid cast up on shore - that awakens with the caw of a thousand …
Pain and Glory (A Movie Poem)
“If you do not write or film”, the director wonders, ”am I alive?” - “What limbo am I in when the shooting stops? When my camera no longer holds the beautiful prism.” - His films stay the same, only he …
Parasite (A Movie Poem)
Parasites: they insinuate themselves into your head, your heart, your art. - They exist in the schizophrenic zone: the lower right corner of your painting looking for patterns that go to childhood, the well rehearsed gestures that allow them to …
Dreaming Graceland or Zombieland: Double Tap (A Movie Poem)
When you think Elvis was a fraud, a rip off the black man’s voice; - when you finally meet someone who smells like candles instead of gunpowder and whiskey; - who is comfortable with you driving that pink Cadillac all …
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Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (A Movie Poem)
The absence of love makes one a villain in other’s hearts. - In the proposal the weeping willow sheds its leaves to the sky, - while in the bowels below the servants of the earth forge war, - pull iron …
Gemini Man (A poem loosely inspired by the movie)
It’s the mirror you don’t look into, the one without the morals, emotions, doubts and fears. - How much wisdom do you gain in confronting your older self, tailing it thru a city of statues and bridges, fighting with it …
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Judy (A Movie Poem)
She always knew that Oz was a one-time voyage lasting until the red shoes dancing on and on cracks the golden road, wears it to dirt dreams, her tired legs collapsing into poppy fields, pills, her voice singing on and …
Ad Astra: To the Stars (A Movie Poem)
Each launch begins with a prayer until I have a puncture, a rip, a tear. Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! I am always falling either to the earth or to the stars, falling forward to God the Father or father to son. …
Dog Acts
I like America’s Got Talent, especially when they have dog acts. I love dog acts. I cry at dog acts. I wish dog acts would bark and chase those young kids and aspiring adults who sing opera every year …
Rain Dance
The rain creates its own ballet starting with a lone figure on a bridge holding an umbrella in the fog splashing teardrops with his feet, doing jetes over the larger puddles, until the wind inverts his shade, plies turning to …
The Hummingbird Bird Project: One Millisecond Better than Most Everything Else
The Hummingbird Project is about the impossibility of stealing time, one millisecond to be exact. That’s how much faster their fiber optic cable spanning from Kansas City to the New York Stock Exchange will be than the competition. Pennies in …
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Stan & Ollie: Finds the Sad Truth After the Visual Gag Has Shined
The best time and light for film biographies is twilight. Everything old looks grand in the dying light and creeping shadows, and it hardly matters that the actorly imitation is a step or two behind the genuine article. At that …
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Gloria Bell: Julianne Moore Gets Stuck in Her Own Msempowerment Story
There is a sadness to all the disco bumping and grinding in Gloria Bell, a remake of the director’s Sebastian Lelio’s 2013 Spanish original Gloria. These are middle age divorced quasi boomers looking for love, but unsure how to negotiate …
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Shazam: The DCU Discovers Its Kid Side
Fans have been waiting for the DC Cinematic Universe to lighten up and are applauding Shazam as a step in the right direction. Shazam is just Big in superhero tights. Only in the dour DC Universe does Shazam seem a …
The Mustang: A Rehabilitative Western
The western at its heart has always been a love story between a man and his horse. The new modern western focus on the rehabilitation of the soul between both man and beast. The Mustang hones in on the very …
“Dumbo”: Tim Burton Soars With an Earthbound Story
In Tim Burton’s version of Dumbo, the only thing that keeps the whole thing from really soaring is the gravity of the plot. Sure, Dumbo the baby elephant needs to overcome earthly woes in order to reach heavenly heights, but …
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The Aftermath: WWII Triangle Caught Between Two Good
The new historical WWII romance The Aftermath seems to be factoring the losing German side feeling into the equation. Kiera Knightley falls in love with Alexander Skarsgard the aristocratic German capitalist whose family mansion has been seized for the personal …
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“Us”: Getting Past Us and the Shtick of Them
Us is them, you, me, U.S., United States and all the good black and white and in between moments. It being horror, Us. is also Halloween, The Birds, The Shining, Jaws, eventually Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, …
“Apollo 11”: Capturing the Glory of Man, Space and Moon
There is something majestic about great moments in history caught gloriously in action. The Apollo 11 moon landing was one of those caught moments in time. Appropriately, a documentary about Apollo 11 wouldn’t need sonorous commentary or analysis, just the …
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“Five Feet Apart”: Needs A Lot More Distance
When sex becomes deadly, it is a horror movie. When it becomes PG-13 and involves cystic fibrosis, viruses and teenage romance it becomes treacly, it becomes Five Feet Apart, which strives to be the ultimate doom teen romance. This movie …
“Captive State”: Rupert Wyatt Tries to Get His Planet of the Apes Revenge.
Rupert Wyatt works better with origin stories than with the post stories and sequels. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a great start for a simian trilogy that was finished vigorously and effectively by Matt Reeves when the …
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“Paddleton”: Settling into the Gentle Comedy That Is Friendship and Death.
Comedies usually begin with a funeral and end with a wedding. Tragedies begin with weddings and end with death. Paddleton (on Netflix) starts with bosom buddies bonding and ends with bereavement. The film never hides what it is, a gentle …
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“Wonder Park”: The Failure of STEM Animation
Wonder Park is probably the first STEM inspired animated film. Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fills its every frame with whirligigs, loop the loops, mini rockets, calculations, precise measurements, blue prints and gears— lots and lots of gears. Wonder Park …
“At Eternity’s Gate”: Too Much Van Gogh Ruins the Art
If art is truly to be unique and great then it can’t be easily reproducible. If every frame of At Eternity’s Gate, a film about Vincent Van Gough directed by Julian Schnabel, is striving to be a reproduction of VVG’s …
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Ode to Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Politician
It’s the Trek and not the Star that keeps her moving. She is a Voyager suspended in the temporal rift of campaigning. - Inside she is Spock. Politics makes her Kirk. On committees she is all Janeway. - The world …
“Captain Marvel”: Empowered Woman in an Un-empowering Origin Story
Captain Marvel has a women empowerment meme that occurs midway: all the earlier versions of Carol Danvers (a fierce Brie Larson) from youth to teen to adult, who got knocked down by men, get right back up and stare straight …
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“Border”: Rising Above the Tragedy of Chromosomes
Border is a caveman fairy tale, a love story about chromosomes gone wrong, a metaphor about how man can rise and fall to his simian origins. It never settles into an evolution of its own, always evolving into different passions, …
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“Velvet Buzzsaw”: An Average Painting in an Average Movie Does Not Equal Greatness
Art has the potential to be great but most of it is mediocre. That is why there are no great film satires about art— the unrelenting tedium of seeing cliches and recycled themes is just a bore. It is like …
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“The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”: Chiwetel Ejiofor Finds His Terribly Beautiful Movie
What stands out in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (a Netflix film) is the terrible beauty of the African country of Malawi. Hope and famine are its human cycle. The majesty of the mountain in the background is unaware …
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“Greta”: Gives Isabelle Huppert the Guignol of Her Career
When an actress like Isabelle Huppert slums in a Grand Guignol schlock fest like Greta she is doing an homage to her old collaborator Claude Chabrol who cast Huppert as his femme fatale in several of his noir mysteries. The …
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“Burning”: Lee Chang-Dong Searches for the Fiery Great Hunger of Existence
Burning refers to both physical and inner emotional fires. The Korean director Lee Chang-Dong delights in taking his movie, an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story, right up to the edge of borders physical (the blare of a North Korean …
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“Shoplifters”: Kore-Eda’s Great Haiku of Family and Light
Hirokazu Kore-Eda Shoplifters has the economy and emotional power of a Haiku. Scenes run the exact length they need to be. There is not an extra syllable, an extra frame, an extra color or ray of light, no unneeded image, …
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“Fighting With My Family”: Gets the Family Participation Prize
WWE wrestling is like family: loud, rowdy, always fighting and making up, a love fest and a mutual admiration society, filled with their own alliances and jealousies, celebrated successes and commiserated failures. It is exactly like its movie Fighting With …
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“How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World”: The Series Finds It’s Final Beauty and Sadness
How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World, finishes the series where it should properly end— at farewell. Farewell to adolescence, to the old Hiccup and Toothless bond and dance, to home, country and enemies. That farewell fusing into …
the rapist god
How does the world forgive a rapist god? By creating many more murdering ones until there is just one murderer proclaiming himself King of the Universe. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, Gandhi said, …
“Cold Pursuit”: Gets to Play Revenge and Death and Cowboys and Indians
The snow piercer pushing cold mass in winged snow drifts in the night chill is death and the driver is Liam Neeson but really revenge in Cold Pursuit. Death and revenge becomes Liam Neeson as it always does in the …
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“Isnt It Romantic”: A Perfect Meta-some Romance
There can be no romantic comedy nowadays without some kind of meta attachment, without a winking nod to its existence in the film catalog. Isn’t It Romantic, starring curvy delight Rebel Wilson, is the ultimate mega romcom title, and if …
Film Course 101
Film is fluid, ink, light, meter an illusion of light that completes the rhyme, a gleaming that is one right word away from the essential one, that one weak word that shows up at the top of the auto-rank, a …
Death Is Like No Movie I Have Ever Seen: The Trailers
At the Miracle my young brother saw death for the first time in a shark called Bruce, Jaws swallowing the onscreen boy on the raft in a chum wave that rippled from the light, a death that drenched every body …
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“Alita: Battle Angel”: Greatness on the Mechanics of Being a Teenager
James Cameron as a producer and Robert Rodriguez as the director of Alita: Battle Angel have such a firm grip on the mechanical heartbeat of what it means to be a teenager that they can control the flow of Alita …
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“What Men Want” Is Not to See This
What Men Want is a gender swapped romantic comedy of the Mel Gibson film What Women Want. Whereas the woman where smarter than Mel in Women- Helen Hunt and Marisa Tomei providing much of the intelligent comedy and smart characterization- …
“The Prodigy” Is Really the Bad Prodigal
The Prodigy loudly proclaims that it is not an Exorcist clone. It runs so far from the Catholic Church that it ends up in the Far East. This is not a possession, it’s a reincarnation. Something that is a sacred …
“The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part”: Everything Is Not as Awesome but Still OKAY
The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part is a comic reflection and anti-reflection of its first part. For Everything Is Awesome song verse there is a Everything Is Not Awesome one, a wise and cynical Emmet to balance the goofy …
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I am deaf and not your simile
I am deaf not deaf, not small d death as some people like to say, but little d as in leaf, as in small l life, even though, you have to drop the l and add the d, for all …
“Miss Bala” Takes the Bullet
Bala means bullet in Spanish and Miss Bala, an indirect remake of a Spanish film with the same title directed by Gerardo Naranjo, implies the bullet in its direct flight will get married to the titled character Gloria Fuentes, played …
Death is like no movie I have ever seen: the commercials
The movie of my death has not been made but it will suck, get O stars, a thumbs down, the bad final review no one will ever see or care about, not because the life wasn’t glorious- it was- but …
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“They Shall Not Grow Old”: Digging Into The Grit, The Horror of WWI
In They Shall Not Grow Old, a WWI documentary directed by Peter Jackson to commemorate its 100 year end, it’s the work a day attitude of the British soldiers as archived on BBC audio records that stands out. For most …
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“The Upside”: Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston Get to Play Black Face White Face
One of the ironies of the Age of Trump is that we get more black and white comedies, not as in film stock, but as in people. Green Book was the best of these. The Upside is just the latest. …
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And the 2019 Best Picture Oscar Goes to…
Wakanda it wonderful that this year a black panther, a blackKklansman, a black concert pianist, a Mexican maid, Dick Cheney and H.R.M. Anne can all be in the same car driven by a racist Italian chauffeur as they go to …
“The Kid Who Would Be King”: Taking England Back to Its Mythic Poetic Childish Self
I need to stop thinking that every kids movie set in England is a Brexit film. Paddington and Paddington 2, Mary Poppins Returns, and Joe Cornish’s latest Arthurian revamping, The Kid Who Would Be King are not Brexit films. Even …
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“Glass” Is M. Night Shyamalan At His Most Fragile
Glass is probably M. Night Shyamalan’s most fragile movie. It is always in danger of shattering from one too many Shyamalan plot twists, from too much incredulous shoe horning the plots of his other movies into the current one. For …
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“We the Animals”: Portrait of the Wild Young Artist
In We the Animals, Jonah’s (Evan Rosado) words in his journal are blurred while the overlaid furiously scribbled art is vividly animated. The director Jeremiah Zagar is showing the congealing of a young artistic mind and vision defining its place …
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“Lizzie”: Gets to the Lessie Behind the Whack Job
In the real courtroom Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murdering her parents but in the court of public opinion and mythic imagination she would be forever adjudged guilty, even honored for it with the infamous 40 whack nursery rhyme. In …
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“On the Basis of Sex”: RBG Gets Her SCOTUS Vibe Going
Ruth Bader Ginsberg is having a good year on film with the release of the documentary RBG and now On the Basis of Sex, the story of her first big court victory for equal rights. Rarely does one get the …
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“If Beale Street Could Talk” It Would Say Let the Women Alone
If Barry Jenkins is looking for something James Baldwin-like to adapt Jenkins should go back and look at Moonlight and know that Baldwin would be happy with that filmic vision rather than the steady technical brilliance of If Beale Street …
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“Ben Is Back”: Julia Roberts Proves That a Determined Mom Is Jesus to a Troubled Child
When Jesus can’t moms save, that is the moral behind Ben Is Back, a harrowing and heartbreaking addiction recovery drama about a mother and son’s (Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges) Christmas Eve journey through a hell scape of past narcotic …
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“Welcome to Marwen”: Robert Zemekis’ Failure of Art and Nerve
Welcome to Marwen, a based on true life feature about an artist forced to create new art and a new persona when a savage attack leaves him devoid of all personal memories and artistic ability, recreates the story and photos, …
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“Escape Room”: An Escape You May Have “Saw” Before
Escape Room’s fun is proportional to the joy and cleverness seen in its set design. When the sets work like one of those find the hidden objects serial puzzles popular On Facebook, Escape Room is a moderately diverting thriller that …
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“Vox Lux”: Another A Star Is Reborn Story
In Vox Lux, a star is reborn tale of a pop singer’s rise and re-rise, characters don’t grow into their roles, they morph into, more precisely match cut into them. The child is cut into the mother’s child, played by …
“Skate Kitchen”: These Girls Got Play
Skate Kitchen, about a gang of avid skateboarding girls in New York City, gets the moments right but muffs the drama. The Instagram worthy boarders are just playing milder version of their true selves, which gained attention in the director’s …
“Mandy”: Nicolas Cage Goes Freaky Deaky Again..But Better
In Mandy, the director Pamos Cosmatos takes Nicolas Cage’s pissed off and grieving husband through a lot of art before he gets to the revenge. All the high saturated greens, blacks and over abundant reds are suppose to be a …
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“Aquaman”: James Wan and Jason Momoa Save the DC Cinematic Universe
It isn’t Jason Momoa’s chiseled abs, pecs, and quads that make him perfect for Aquaman; nor his abundant scaly and wavy henna tattoos adorning those wondrous abs and pecs; nor his acting style which is a mix of strongman moments …
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“Vice”: Dick Cheney Gets the Power and the Shaft He Deserves
Vice captures the reality and non-reality of Dick Cheney (Christian Bale), a man who sought power or at least to control the men who have it. That makes his amoral quest a Hollywood comedy. The director Adam McKay treats Cheney …
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“Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”: Where You Decide If Netflix Is the Villain or Not?
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Netflix's interactive full length Black Mirror episode prides itself on its game-ability and meta-ness that stays steps ahead of the average viewer. Binary on screen choices can lead to different outcomes in this sci-fi cautionary tale of …
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