Seven years before the Pulitzer Prize-winning global phenomenon that is HAMILTON opened on Broadway in 2015 and blew the roof off staged musicals forever, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda's first Broadway musical the Tony Award-winning IN THE HEIGHTS opened in the same theater in 2008. Now, like "Hamilton," it's also a movie, a glorious movie more powerful [...]
It's my favorite film so far this season: THE FAVOURITE, an 18th century biopic about British Queen Anne. A good old-fashioned, period costume drama? No bloody way. It's "Dangerous Liaisons" shot through the looking glass, except that it's "Anne" instead of "Alice," and "les liaisons" are decidedly and historically lesbian. THE FAVOURITE is [...]
If you don’t have time to read the FULL TEXT REVIEW of “42”– check out my :30 Second Review with video for a short, smart critical assessment of this biopic about Jackie Robinson who broke Baseball's color barrier –and get the bottom line fast!
LIFE OF PI which earned director ANG LEE an OSCAR this year-- is now out on DVD. If you're trying to decide whether or not to see, check out my new :30 Second Review feature with video to get the bottom line fast!
Some things never get old--and Bruce Willis as John McClane is one of them. For the fifth time, A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD brings the relentless NYPD hero back -- this time in geri-action-- but the formula still works. Once again, it's John McClane against a world of bad guys; we know who's going [...]
The Oscars are Feb 24, and over the next few days there are few "Oscar" films I need to catch you up on before the big event! See a French film called AMOUR which won this year's Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is among this year's nine Oscar nominees for Best Picture. [...]
The most ravishing movie of the season is ANNA KARENINA , novelist Leo Tolstoy's sweeping pageant of love, marriage, passion, family, God, nature, and the constraints of class and society in 19th century Russia. The elegantly beautiful Keira Knightley stars as ANNA KARENINA who falls in love with a young, rich, good-looking cavalry officer, Count Vronsky. [...]
I have seen LINCOLN-- and he is Daniel Day-Lewis. This is an absolutely flawless performance, which together with Spielberg's direction, Tony Kushner's screenplay, based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's book TEAM OF RIVALS, and a treasure trove of vivid performances -- has resulted in one of the finest movies of the year, and one [...]
It's hair-raising-- but DON'T MISS this FLIGHT! It's an unexpectedly emotional, quiet, faintly pious, but deeply engrossing dramatic thriller, which stars a slightly paunchy Denzel Washington as a veteran airline pilot named Whip Whitaker; he's as cocky as his name. He struts down the gangway, immaculate in uniform, sunglasses on, baby. In fact, he's cruising [...]
Within the first minute of director Oliver Stone's SAVAGES, we hear Blake Lively's character say in voice over about the man we see sexually grinding her to a pulp, that she has "orgasms," but "he has war-gasms." And we know we're off on a testosterone-fueled rampage where men are at war and women-- even when [...]
