On the night of Feb. 20, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower interrupted a vacation in Palm Springs, Calif. Some say he made an unexpected visit to Edwards Air Force Base. There, in the secret meeting to end all secret meetings, he rendezvoused with a pair of angelic, white-haired, blue-eyed extraterrestrials, who cautioned the president — to no avail — to eliminate his … [Read more...]
Ambitious ‘Radioactive’ captures Curie’s psychology, shortchanges her work
The discovery that would change humanity forever arrives relatively early in Radioactive, the long-awaited biopic of Marie Curie. We’re not 30 minutes in, and she’s already captured the phenomenon of radioactivity, in all its Ectoplasmic-green glow, in a tiny vial. It happens after a perfunctory montage of beakers and equations, of Marie (Rosamund Pike) and her husband and … [Read more...]
Starry ‘The Truth’ too insular to make deep impact
To note that The Truth is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s starriest movie to date is to understate. While the Japanese director’s previous 13 films have been cast with actors unfamiliar to the non-cinephile masses, and often earn little more than festival and art-house exhibition, his latest has all the ingredients for broader appeal and a wide theatrical opening — something it was poised … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A Dardenne brothers masterpiece and more
When I started writing the View From Home column for this website in 2010, it was single-focused on physical media — the Blu-rays and DVDs that had yet to be usurped by the streaming juggernauts. Times have changed, and while I too have integrated streaming for the majority of home viewing, exciting physical media still drops every week, and for certain titles it remains … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Tommaso’ finds Ferrara, Dafoe through the looking glass
As a work of semi-improvised metafiction set in Rome, Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso (now playing in Virtual Cinemas) is a fragrant cipollini onion inviting us to peel away its layers. Is Willem Dafoe’s titular protagonist, a volatile expat filmmaker with a marriage on the rocks, wrestled from Ferrara’s own troubled biography? Is Dafoe playing a raw version of himself? When he tells … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Three free food docs on YouTube
As I discovered recently, YouTube is not only an infinitely populated platform for pay-per-view movies both classic and brand-new. It’s also a generous purveyor of free movies easily stream-able on your smart TV through the basic YouTube app. The bulk of these titles are fairly obscure — what used to be dubbed “straight to video” — but spelunkers of the entire “free movies” … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘The Vast of Night’ is a perfectly timed sound bath of adventure
The impact of the film industry on the coronavirus pandemic has been depressingly documented, from the indefinite postponement of movie shoots to the delayed release of studio pictures to the continued closures — some will be permanent — of cinemas. Audio-based art forms, on the other hand, are thriving. Offering the illusion of intimacy but the safety of distance, radio and … [Read more...]
The VIew From Home: ‘Biosphere 2,’ the game-changer that might have been
The reality-show trappings of the infamous and grandiose Biosphere 2 project are, from today’s jaundiced eye, inescapable. A vivarium constructed in the Arizona desert to house eight intrepid “Biospherians,” five environmental biomes and a curated variety of flora and fauna, the venture was designed as a prototype for a colony on Mars or the moon. The octet of personalities … [Read more...]
The View From Home: More gems from Criterion
Like you, I’m stuck at home for what has begun to feel like an eternal, if comfort-filled, purgatory. But movies have been my escape from the dreadful and the humdrum. My recent adventures with the Criterion Channel app continued with six more eclectic features — five gems and one dud. La Vie de Boheme: When I reviewed Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre, in 2011, I must have skimped … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Six gems from Criterion
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...]