”Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Those immortal words have been parodied to death over the years and if you haven’t seen Chinatown, you would have heard those lines spoofed in another film or TV show. Once you see what has just occurred and those five words are uttered by Joe Mantell who played Jake Gittes’s […]
Turning up on Amazon Prime’s streaming service like a lost sock, Mike Nichols’ forgotten comedy is a star-powered throwback to the screwball comedy era, top-lined by Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. Comedy and period revivals were a big deal in the 70’s, from What’s Up Doc? To The Sting, but The Fortune, despite an illustrious […]
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 9 out of 10. Oh – hello there. The following tale of celebrity fetishisation and psychotic delusions is true. And by true, I mean false. Welcome, to The King of Comedy. I’d just like to make this clear: I love this film. And by love, I do not mean hate. In every sense […]
Is The King of Comedy Scorsese’s Best Film? No – It’s Simply The Best Film
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 8 out of 10. The world can end in many ways: a super-volcanic eruption, an asteroid impact, a gamma ray burst, a devastating pandemic (that one’s still on the table), even a rogue black hole. But while those are all a vengeful mother nature’s doing, nuclear warfare could only be placed on humanities’ […]
Dr. Strangelove: How Kubrick Made Us Love The Bomb
Never, ever mess with war Widows. Nearly a decade in the making and fourteen months in the releasing, the next chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is here at long last, two years after Spider-Man: Far From Home capped off Phase III in theaters. Fans had to content themselves with Marvel’s new above-average TV fare […]
Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Black Widow” End Credits
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Note : 8.5 sur 10. The cultural zeitgeist of mockumentaries (or ‘rockumentaries’, if you will), a film doesn’t simply get credited with that title without some of the greatest jokes ever to be told. I don’t think I need to say anymore. But I will, because this would a very boring review if I didn’t. This […]
This Is Spinal Tap Still Stands Eighteen Inches Tall
It doesn’t look like much. The Harrisville, Rhode Island home might not get a lot of second or third looks on Zillow. “Needs paint” translates as “rustic” and “historic.” “Low ceilings” just means its out of date. But “historic” is right on the mark. This 300 year-old wood frame/clapboard house is where the events depicted […]
Documentary Review: The “Conjuring” house goes AirBnB — “The Sleepless Unrest”
The crew of three dock with their starship to Mars, pop the hatch on their shiny, white, aluminum alloy and glass space ship and busy themselves with firing it up to make another trip to the Red Planet, and overcoming motion sickness. It’s a complex “cycler” craft, generating artificial gravity by tethering and rotating the […]
Netflixable? A “Stowaway” on a space ship? Who isn’t an Alien? Or a Predator?
The year is 1981 and Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, of course!) have just screwed up another exorcism. Only Ed hears as Arne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor) begs the demon that has possessed 8 year-old David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard) to enter him instead. Unfortunately, Ed also has a heart attack and passes […]
Film Review: The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (dir by Michael Chaves)
The Second Civil War (1997) A very uncivil comedy So, Joe Dante’s unjustly obscure 1997 HBO movie, The Second Civil War, landed on Binge recently as part of the Aussie streaming service’s ongoing process of trawling through HBO’s more obscure properties for content. Having not watched the thing in years since I lost or gave […]
Looking back, I think that two movies shaped and/or reinforced my views on “the criminal mind,” the folks who rob, cheat, vandalize and threaten as if they were born to it. “Donnie Brasco” (1998) set in stone my hunch that what Deep Throat said about the Watergate Burglars and the GOP leadership holds true for […]
Classic Film Review: Hoffman’s at his toughest doing “Straight Time” (1978)
Some films achieve “classic” status and even become pop culture shorthand, but eventually find themselves dismissed as overly-earnest, “of its time,” or even “self-parody.” More than one Stanley Kramer production of the ’50s on into the ’70s has suffered that fate. A self-conscious/socially-conscious filmmaker, it’s hard to think of anybody in the modern cinema that […]
Classic Film Review: “The Defiant Ones” (1958) hold up a lot better than expected
This could be the greatest high brow movie battle of all time, pitting Roger Ebert’s favorite movie against the most decorated movie of the 80s. Amadeus was released in 1984 to critical praise and is the fictional biography of Mozart, the famous composer, and his story shares a lot in common with Ebert’s favorite movie, […]
Greatest of the High Brow: Beethoven vs Mozart
T.S (Jeremy London) and his friend Brodie (Jason Lee) go to the mall after their girlfriends break up with them. Hijinks ensue. I feel I’m not in on the joke. While I’m aware that Clerks preceded this film I still feel as if I’m wandering in an abyss while everyone praises this film. First, the […]
It’s hard to think of a movie, short or feature-length, a TV show or a play that, setting out to ridicule the critic profession, hasn’t landed a few sucker punches and body blows. Jon Lovitz, paunchy and animated for TV, always reviewing movies in T-shirts studios give out to advertise their movies, Bob Balaban’s owlish, […]
Movie Review: Horror fan stuck among serial killers, all in “Vicious Fun”
In 1946, a London writer, Juliet (Lily James) exchanges letters with a Guernsey farmer, Dawsey (Michiel Huisman) and she begins to learn about what the islanders endured during World War II under German occupation. I read the book on which this film is based a while ago. I’m also (as of August 2020) a resident […]
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
Title – The Wages of Fear (1953) Director – Henri-Georges Clouzot (Manon) Cast – Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, Peter van Eyck Plot – When an oil well ignites in flames deep in a remote section of South American wilderness, a group of four men are enticed via significant financial incentives to transport a […]
Classic Review – The Wages of Fear (1953)
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.5 out of 5. Nowadays, it is so difficult to differentiate the truth from lies. False allegations and conspiracy theories are easily being spread to be sold as the truths. But the only person who knows what is the truth and what is not is the one who becomes a ‘target’ of it. […]
Tribeca 2021: “Enemies of the State”
Christoph Waltz stars in and makes his directorial debut with “Georgetown”, a too-crazy-to-be-true crime drama that’s actually based on an true story. Well, sort of. The film is written by screenwriter David Auburn and is taken from a 2012 New York Times Magazine article by Franklin Foer titled “The Worst Marriage in Georgetown”. I haven’t […]
The new trailer for “Till Death” may leave you a little uneasy about taking a romantic getaway with your significant other. The new thriller from first-time director S.K. Dale and screenwriter Jason Carvey sees Megan Fox leading a small cast working in a snowy single location. The trailer sets up the premise nicely and if […]
