The Criterion Collection has been the preeminent authority on art-house home viewing since it released its first laserdisc (Citizen Kane, 1984) and its first DVD (Grand Illusion, 1998). Adapting with the times, its reach has extended beyond physical media: Criterion’s catalog became available digitally as part of the late, great FilmStruck service, and for the past year it has … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Global film adventure in Miami’s virtual cinemas
If you’ve never made the epic, multi-hour trek from the Palm Beaches to the art-house theaters of central Miami and Coral Gables, you can now experience their adventurous programming from the comfort of your coronaviral shelter. In an effort to generate some business following their March closures, the Tower Theater opened a Virtual Theater, and the Coral Gables Art Cinema … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A treasure trove on TCM
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...]
In ‘Wendy,’ filmmaker finds another side of Peter Pan
When your feature film debut becomes an international sensation, pulling in four Oscar nominations, the conventional wisdom is to quickly produce a follow-up to cash in on the first movie’s success. That is precisely what director-screenwriter Benh Zeitlin did not do after 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, a remarkable film about climate change in the Louisiana … [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...]
And the Oscar winners will be …
New Jersey casinos have started to take bets on the Oscars, but you probably do not have time to head that way and place a wager. So instead, take my scientifically projected winners’ list and bet with your friends and family or simply impress them by calling out the winners just before they are announced on the air. Regardless of how you use this valuable information, … [Read more...]