As someone who is millennial-adjacent, I’ve watched as friends and colleagues younger than I — and some older folks too — cut the proverbial cord on the musty cable monopolies that satisfied so much of my entertainment diet over the decades. Roku boxes and Fire sticks are the new satellite dishes and Xfinity consoles. It may boast more channels and on-demand opportunities than … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Finding classics on Netflix
In essence, the movie-criticism paradigm hasn’t changed much since the earliest days of the studio system: We critics publish our reviews the week a movie opens theatrically. What happens to us scribblers when the theaters shutter, and the model that has sustained this dwindling profession is disrupted? With the coronavirus prompting the swift closure of cinemas nationwide, … [Read more...]
‘Swallow’: You are what you eat
It’s about time somebody made a movie about pica, the psychological condition, first described by Hippocrates, of habitually consuming non-nutritive objects: soil, paint, glass, needles. Because of pica’s generic intersection between psychodrama and body horror, I would have thought that somebody would have been David Cronenberg. But Swallow is the work of a new voice — … [Read more...]
‘You Go To My Head’: Amnesia plot skims noir surface
Forget bars, and forget Tinder. For Jake (Svetozar Cvetkovic), the 54-year-old architect of You Go To My Head who lives alone in a remote property he designed on the Moroccan outskirts, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to meet women. So he seizes on happenstance. On an expedition to collect ground samples for a future project, he spots, through his binoculars, a stylish … [Read more...]
‘Invisible Man’: The misogynist’s revenge
Elisabeth Moss is still fleeing Gilead. In The Invisible Man, Leigh Wannell’s psychodramatic remake of H.G. Wells’ science-fiction classic, she plays Cecilia Kass, wife/prisoner in a sleek fortress owned by a tech billionaire on a secluded cliffside in Northern California. He controls every aspect of her life — what she wears, eats and says, and increasingly what she thinks — … [Read more...]
‘José’: Gay in Guatemala, and learning to soldier on
An early candidate for the most joyous scene in a 2020 movie can be found midway through José, a prizewinning Guatemalan Bildungsroman. The title character (Enrique Salanic), who works a menial restaurant job in a noisy and overcrowded city, has managed to obtain the use of a motorcycle for a day. He picks up his boyfriend, Luis (Manolo Herrera) for a two-wheeled trip to … [Read more...]
‘Les Misérables’: Gritty French cop drama raises timeless themes of injustice
There are more pleasant first days on the job than the one experienced by Stéphane Ruiz (Damien Bonnard), a Parisian police officer newly transferred to the city’s Street Crime Unit, in director Ladj Ly’s combustible Les Misérables. He’s barely been introduced to his superiors when he is sent on his first assignment, shadowing and assisting longtime partners Chris (Alexis … [Read more...]
‘Advocate’ offers rare perspective on Israeli-Arab conflict
Of all the complicated geopolitical flashpoints, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is arguably still the most ideologically entrenched, the most bitterly divided, the prickliest to discuss with any degree of nuance or decorum. It is in this environment, in which one person’s defense of an accused Palestinian “freedom fighter” is another person’s unconscionable representation of … [Read more...]
‘Invisible Life’: Sisters are fighting it for themselves
Set primarily in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão is a film of dew and perspiration, of longing and pheromones. The heat, torrid and constant, causes everything to sweat, from people to the glasses they drink from. The movie practically glistens with their labor of everyday survival. When Guida Gusmão (Julia Stockler), young and rebellious sister … [Read more...]
HR is out to lunch in formulaic ‘Like a Boss’
Hollywood’s latest ladies-talking-dirty comedy is proof that simply acing the Bechdel Test is no longer enough — and that to make another winning Paul Feig or Judd Apatow film, you kinda need a Paul Feig or Judd Apatow at the helm. But first, the positives. The two women at the center of Miguel Arteta’s Like a Boss, lifelong besties Mia Carter (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel Paige … [Read more...]