In recent weeks and months, Hollywood’s legacy of cultural appropriation and racism has come under increased scrutiny, with the latest controversy erupting over the lack of Emmy nominations for Latinx television actors (a dialog which then morphed into a heated debate over charges of “anti-Blackness” within said community). Special ire, meanwhile, has been directed towards […]
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Simon Rich is an extremely gifted satirist. The former SNL writer is also the mastermind behind the FX cult comedy Man Seeking Woman and the TBS show Miracle Workers, as well as many short stories and a few novels – all of which contain some element of absurdity and metaphor. Rich’s stories are imaginative, often […]
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With a skill that would impress even its writer protagonist, I Used to Go Here excels in its efforts to show, not tell. In just its first five minutes, Kris Rey’s comedy slyly reveals key elements that define who Kate Conklin (Gillian Jacobs) is, doing a better job of building a character over just a […]
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The paydirt in the opening of Paydirt is actual dirt, stuffed into garbage bags and buried under other dirt, and then dug up by a drug kingpin known as El Gordo (Jay Montalvo). El Gordo isn’t looking for dirt, of course: He’s trying to find the $33 million stolen by a cheeky robber known as […]
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“That twinkle in your eye,” Clark Gable marvels at Carole Lombard in No Man of Her Own. “Wrap it up for me, will you?” It’s a moment of unguarded onscreen thirst, and watching the film now, as part of KL Studio Classics’ new “Carole Lombard Collection I,” it functions on multiple levels. It’s easy to […]
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Few films aimed at children have made the case for the value of every life as clearly as Babe did in 1995. Yes, that Babe—the film about the pig who acted like a sheepdog, with the talking animals, and the chapter-style format mimicking the storybook upon which the film was based (The Sheep-Pig by Dick […]
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Few artists can plan a career for themselves, especially in the uncertain world of filmmaking. Most work has to be taken as it’s offered, which is why so many artists end up jacks of all trades. This was certainly the case with Ennio Morricone, who began his career not in films but in a variety […]
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With all its poignant elements — a World War II setting, a quaint seaside town, a long-lost love, a child who changes an adult’s life for the better, and on and on — Summerland should be a sticky sweet English confection, gooey and topped with treacle. However, in her feature debut, writer/director Jessica Swale has […]
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Like The Stepford Wives, I’d avoided the original Rollerball due to a flaw over which it had no responsibility: spawning an unapologetically terrible remake. So, like Stepford, its recent appearance on Amazon Prime prompted an overdue first watch for Norman Jewison’s futuristic sports drama, released in 1975 but set in, hey look at that, 2018. […]
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Harry Palmer’s personal file reads like a permanent record: “Insubordinate, insolent, a trickster…perhaps with criminal tendencies.” When his new boss, another stiff-upper-lip with a patriotic apathy for human life, reads it back to him, Palmer cocks a proper Jack-the-Lad grin and admits, “Yeah, that’s a pretty fair appraisal, sir.” In author Len Deighton’s world of […]
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Though box office bombs come and go, some live on in infamy. Kevin Reynolds’ post-apocalyptic action flick Waterworld holds the usual traits of other bombs — big stars, questionable creative decisions and performances — except pitched to eleven. Conceptually based upon the catastrophic extremes of global warming and decorated by spectacle, the adventure made a […]
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I grew up in the Rotten.com days. For the morbid adolescent, crime scene photos and grisly images of freak accidents were a click away. Now defunct, the site traded in the bizarre, lifting the beaded curtain to that shadowy forbidden room at the video store– though the treasures to be found were far darker than […]
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