Actually, a better choice is to revisit Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” which commences thousands of years ago where two tropes of gorillas, are fighting for dominance (reminiscent of 2024 election between the Democrats and Republicans); Kubrick’s genius in 1968 is revelatory in its vision: viable planets, unimaginable transport, and the remarkability of Artificial Intelligence (“Hal” vs “Siri”) opening …
Read More »Monthly Archives: February 2025
PENEFLIX PREDICTIONS: 97TH ACADEMY AWARDS
Another banner year in movie-making history; in so many ways it was glorifying, shockingly innovative and uproarious, titillating fun. Countless times I exited smiling, smirking, thinking “I got it”, I wasn’t fooled, but enriched by the ambiguity; directors have unleashed their colossal control, allowing viewers to fill in the blanks. Recently a woman told me that she felt from the …
Read More »BRING THEM DOWN (in theatres)
An intensely orchestrated and depicted feud between two Irish families in the solemn, untarnished, unforgiving landscape of the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland; Shakesperean in scale (Montagues & Capulets) the shepherding world collides catastrophically between the O’Sheas and Keelys; “Michael O’Shea” (Christopher Abbott, silently sensational), seething with a history of remorse and under the tyrannical tutelage of his father “Ray” (crucial …
Read More »I’M STILL HERE ( Brazil: Portuguese, English subtitles) in theatres
The commencement of this potent, poignant, profound film is saturated in palatable love; director Walter Salles’s portrait of Rubens Paiva’s (a former Congressman opposed to the military dictatorship in 1960’s Brazil) family, seeped in saccharine, sugary, uxorious affection: Fernanda Torres is stratospherically phenomenal as Rubens wife, Eunice, mother of five and madly, ardently infatuated with her husband; theirs, a love …
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