After a year when the Motion Picture Academy scrubbed its bad idea to create an Oscar category for Most Popular Picture, some of the highest-grossing films were nominated for the top statuette of 2019. Black Panther became the first superhero movie to earn a Best Picture nomination, poised to compete against two other mainstream popular high box office films – Bohemian … [Read more...]
Capsule reviews: Four movies at the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival
Here are capsule reviews of four films showing in the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, which opens Sunday and runs through Feb. 12. The Last Resort: What begins as a nostalgic look at the changing face of Miami Beach turns much darker in The Last Resort, a history of the 1970s cultural transformation of the area as seen through the lenses of two fascinated young … [Read more...]
Jewish Film Festival returns, landing important premieres
For the past three decades, January in Palm Beach County has been synonymous with an international array of Jewish-themed movies. And beginning Sunday, the 29th annual Donald M. Ephraim Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival screens 33 such selections – many of them world, Florida or county premieres – at four venues over 21 days. This will also be the sixth such event for … [Read more...]
Shymalan holds ‘Glass’ up to his devotees, but few others
How many times can an artist deconstruct his craft and still surprise us? How often can a magician reveal his illusions and still leave us flummoxed? This is the challenge facing M. Night Shyamalan, Hollywood’s most esoteric trickster, as he burrows ever deeper into the cocoon of his cinematic universe, not so much playing to mainstream audiences as to film theorists, comic … [Read more...]
Maddin’s ‘Green Fog’: I left my angst in San Francisco
A work of ecstatic cinephilia run gloriously amok, Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog both is and isn’t a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Climaxing at a brisk 63 minutes and composed entirely of scenes from other movies and TV shows shot in San Francisco — 101 titles made the cut, from more than 200 Maddin viewed for inspiration — The Green Fog is an example of director as … [Read more...]
Hap’s year in review: 2018’s best in film and local theater
Ten best lists are notoriously subjective, but here are my bests in film and theater for 2018. Go ahead, argue with me. Make my day. FILM 1. Green Book – Yes, it is an odd couple road trip movie, but director/co-writer Peter Farrelly (right, the guy who gave us Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary) takes those familiar tropes and turns them into a slyly … [Read more...]
As critique of the zeitgeist, ‘Vox Lux’ falls flat
Any film that adopts as its subtitle “A Twenty-First Century Portrait” better be profound enough to live up to such a grandiose decree. Writer-director Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux does indeed have millennial zeitgeist on its mind, from the new normal of mass shootings to post-9/11 malaise to the deification of celebrity. But Corbet’s film is a purely academic exercise, written … [Read more...]
‘Vice’ takes on Cheney, but it’s a mess
When I think of actors portraying Vice President Dick Cheney, I’ll always jump to Richard Dreyfuss in W. first. Remember that scene around the war room, when he emerges literally from the shadows and outlines a sinister plot to take Iraq’s oil and establish permanent American hegemony in the Middle East? Dreyfuss didn’t sound much like Cheney — he sounded like Dreyfuss — but … [Read more...]
‘Divide and Conquer’ reveals secrets of Ailes the Dark Lord
Divide and Conquer, documentarian Alexis Bloom’s account of the fractious rise and ignominious fall of the late Roger Ailes, presents its subject as the lonely, fearful and paranoid arsonist of our present political dumpster fire, with delusions of grandeur worthy of Don Quixote and an ego as inflated as the Goodyear blimp. It’s not for nothing that Bloom’s interviewees compare … [Read more...]
Our town, unvarnished: Wiseman’s ‘Monrovia, Indiana’
For a storyteller, a place like Monrovia is the closest they’ll find to a blank page in the sprawling American landscape. The town, in south-central Indiana, boasted a population of 1,063 from the last Census, and its “History” page on Wikipedia is five, mostly short, sentences. One is about a post office, extant since 1834. Another reads “The town is the subject of the … [Read more...]