Every role, every life’s lesson prepared Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant to depict the tragic demise of “Anne” and “Georges”; a classically beautiful, harmonious marriage suffocated by horrific, debilitating circumstances. Director and screenwriter Michael Haneke (“The White Ribbon”) uses these two inimitable actors to paint a devastating portrait of the effects of a stroke on cultured, intellectual, “Anne”, her caregiver, …

After 20 films, all comprising a bovine blob, sloshing simultaneously in my beleaguered brain, recognizing a need for a stimulus-free void to synthesize, analyze, masticate and separate the mediocre from the sublime; arriving home to the Academy Award nominations, exhausted, exhilarated, energized by the electric, enticing, exciting, imaginative world of cinema, knowing its ubiquity will never cease to overwhelm and …

HAPPIEST OF NEW YEAR’S TO ALL MY DEVOTED SUBSCRIBERS. YOUR COMMENTS, INSIGHTS NEVER CEASE TO BRING ME JOY, WISDOM AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING MINUTES. FILM CONSTANTLY BROADENS HORIZONS, WARMS THE HEART, CHALLENGES CONCEPTIONS, KEEPING THE ARTERIES OPEN AND THE MIND ELASTIC. THANK YOU! BE ON THE ALERT FOR MINI REVIEWS OF WHAT TO AVOID OR SEEK OUT IN THE MAGICAL REALM OF …

There are times when the comfort of predictability, a cocoon of complacency is the perfect anecdote in a season of massive doses of mayhem, morbidity, dismemberment and destruction. “Promised Land” is the fare, pabulum, alleviating the the gloom of “Les Miz,” “Django Unchained”; a dose of “fracking” (a combination of water, sand and chemicals, hydraulically drilled into the ground to …