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...]
‘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...]
‘Joker’ gets last laugh with Academy nods
Speaking of jokes and jokers, did you hear the one about the comic book movie with a clownish, homicidal leading character that unexpectedly landed at the top of the Oscar nominations list this morning with 11 mentions? Joker, which scored nominations for best picture, director, actor, adapted screenplay and in seven other categories, becomes only the second comic book … [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...]
2019’s Top 10 in Film: Scorsese’s ‘Irishman’ leads the field
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime will play a major qualitative role in awards and best lists, if not box office, this year. Everything looks better on a theater screen rather than your home TV, but a film like Martin Scorsese’s epic, three-and-a-half-hour The Irishman seems designed for home viewing, with its ability to accommodate bathroom and nap breaks. … [Read more...]
‘1917’: All soulless on the Western Front
How’s this for a criticism: There’s something unbearably perfect about Sam Mendes’ World War I picture 1917. On the one hand, the film — specially formatted for IMAX’s expansive 1:90:1 aspect ratio — takes great pains to reestablish moviegoing as a necessary cinematic experience, an increasingly quaint notion in the day-and-date streaming era. But it reaches for this … [Read more...]
‘Little Women’: A masterful, ravishing vision of young adulthood
I’m either the best or the worst person to review the latest adaptation of Little Women. I’ve not seen any of the previous seven adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age family saga — not even the George Cukor; heresy, I know — nor have I read the book. Which is to say that you won’t find any gripes regarding the latest iteration’s fealty to the source, or, … [Read more...]
‘Ray & Liz’: A bleak slog through the bogs of English misery
The setting of Richard Billingham’s debut feature Ray & Liz is a council flat in England’s Black Country, a series of boroughs so named because of the coal mines and other heavy-industry dross that congested its air and sickened its population of people too poor to live anywhere else. It’s a moldering, putrid place, and you can almost smell it through the screen. The … [Read more...]