The show is smoothly staged before an appreciative audience, with well-chosen theatrical touches. The simplified sets – café, Jenna’s modest living room, Jim’s doctor’s office – swing in and out, suggesting the locations without trying to be too detailed. In one particularly effective musical number, the furniture from one location slides away mid-song, leaving Jenna … Read more
“The Boy and the Heron” is the story of a 12-year-old named Mahito Maki, whose mother dies in a hospital fire in Tokyo, sending him to the countryside with a distant father named Shoichi and a new, pregnant mother named Natsuko, the sister of Mahito’s late mother. Mahito understandably operates from a place of grief … Read more
Post-apocalyptic movies have almost become a holiday tradition for Netflix. “Don’t Look Up,” “White Noise,” “Bird Box” have all arrived in the Thanksgiving to Christmas window in recent years. While “Leave the World Behind,” adapted from the same-titled novel by Rumaan Alam, bears some superficial similarities with McKay and Baumbach’s disaster offerings, you mostly feel … Read more
Sometimes the movie’s tendency of favoring movie clips and bombastic soundbites doesn’t really matter since the juxtaposition of so many clashing personalities still creates its own lunatic harmony. In the movie’s most disarming and logic-frying transition, we jump from fellow New German Cinema filmmaker Wim Wenders, who seems to be on to something when he … Read more
Family Matters wasn’t just a hit sitcom — it was a show that touched a generation. With the breakout success of the Steve Urkel character — and the extremely wacky nature of some episodes — it’s still baffling that fans never received a spinoff or cartoon when it seemed like the perfect fit. Thankfully, the … Read more
Todd Haynes’s May December starts as a kind of camp satire of the true crime genre but emerges as a wrenching tale. PLOT: An ambitious actress (Natalie Portman) shadows an infamous former tabloid figure (Julianne Moore) she’s playing in a movie. REVIEW: May December is loosely based on the Mary Kay Letourneau case. This was … Read more
“The Sweet East” has something of a plot following the adventures of Lillian (Talia Ryder), an independent high schooler from South Carolina who is flung from one bizarre piece of America to the next. At first, it’s a shooting at a pizza restaurant that echoes the real-life absurdity of Pizzagate. Lillian is separated from her … Read more
But as writer, director and producer of “Renaissance,” Beyoncé Knowles-Carter clearly cares very deeply about making sure that every single thing is perfect, both in the tour and in the film about the tour. Her quest for absolute excellence, for obsessing over details large and small, already was evident in “Homecoming,” the infectious Netflix documentary she … Read more
The now-81 Nikzad Nodjoumi is an Iranian artist who moved to New York in the ‘60s, finding his revolutionary spirit in a time when it was everywhere in the Big Apple, only to watch the rise of the Shah in his home country. Of course, this political and social upheaval formed the Islamic Revolution, and … Read more
Although it takes its time to embrace its magical premise, mostly in favor of building out the elaborate subplots for each of the Carver family members, once it gets into full on gonzo mode it’s the most delightfully deranged family film since “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.” There’s seven swans swimming in the Carver’s … Read more