“MY FAVORITE CAKE”  (IRAN, FRANCE, SWEDEN & GERMANY) DIRECTORS, MARYAM MOGHADDAM, BEHTASH SANAEEHA Time does not dictate “affairs of the heart” and you do not choose the subject of desire; it just happens and “My Favorite Cake” is a refreshing, joyous connection between a chance meeting of two individuals “forever young”. FOUR STARS!!!! “GHOST TRAIL” (FRANCE, GERMANY, BELGIUM) DIRECTOR, JONATHAN …

“THE PIANO LESSON” (US) The Washington brothers (Malcolm, director, John David, actor) give immediate license to August Wilson’s 1987 play of the same title.  And an iconic, macabre exorcism, that will satisfy those lusting for the “horror” tremors. FOUR STARS!!!! “THE ART OF JOY” (ITALY/UK)  DIRECTOR, VALERIA GOLINO) For devotees of “length” this over five-hour film should satisfy your lusty, …

We have been doused/soused with a plethora of movies dealing with the vicissitudes of alcoholic women: “Days of Wine and Roses”: “Woman Under the Influence”, “When a Man Loves a Woman”, “28 Days”, “To Leslie” but we’ve never come across “Rona” a blue-haired, twenty-nine-year-old harridan, whose demonic side is birthed in every inebriated phase; Saorise Ronan, also a producer tackles …

For decades multitudes of books, documentaries and movies have focused on the ugliness of the undreamed, unmitigated crimes perpetrated by the German architects of horror. “White Bird: A Wonder Story” by R. J. Palacio is a mystifying tale of the ordinary, rising above the monstrous, securing residency in the celestial; a wonderous movie that should be seen by all; especially …

“Folie a Deux” a colloquialism for two crazies hooking up, and there are no finer templates than “Arthur Fleck” (Joaquin Phoenix) and “Lee” (Lady Gaga); stunning, magically disturbing power couple who make “Joker” into a reminiscent musical, moveable feast: “What the World Needs Now Is Love” (Burt Bacharach), “For Once in My Life” (Ron Miller)), “If My Friends Could See …

Francis Ford Coppola (1939-) in his dotage must have had a petit mal seizure, an hallucination; creating a fable, mimicking the fall of the Roman Empire (31BC-AD 476); steroidal ambition meshes the historical with the future; doused in euphemisms bordering on the ludicrous: Adam Driver, seemed ill-equipped and jejune as “Caesar” a supreme architect prancing atop a rather hideous structure, …

Lee Miller (1907-1977) was a woman of prodigious substance, a feminine force, a rule bender, barrier basher and a lifelong, in tandem with Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), destroyer of the male, testosterone dominated universal sphere. She had it all: luminous beauty, sophistication in qualitative abundance, lover and muse of Man Ray (1890-1976); inquisitive intellect that transcended gender bias; as a realistic …

Mephistopheles is cackling from his eighth level of hell, as “Elizabeth Sparkle” (magically sculpted by Demi Moore) succumbs to her Faustian fallacy; a perpetual mirrored image of her ingénue years; rather implausible since we meet her on her 50th birthday. Director Coralie Fargeat (48 years-old) pounces on the ubiquity of denial, futility of staving off the aging process and the …

Regardless of its Greek and Latin origins, defined as “able to discern”, the critic’s role, to judge, evaluate, interpret categorically sinks into the negative realm of toxic criticism in “The Critic” (based on 2015 novel “Curtain Call” by Anthony Quinn) and Ian McKellen as  “The Daily Chronicle’s” London theatre critic “Jimmy Erskine” champions as an acerbic annihilator, castrator, humiliator of all …

An oxymoronic title is the first hint of what is to come, and it plays out deliciously in Christie/Holmes style; lavish wedding on a sanctioned estate goes awry in the wee hours of the wedding day; beautiful, dead guest “Merritt Monaco”, (luscious Meghann Fahy) surfaces on the Nantucket shore of an apparent drowning/suicide. Estate owners “Greer Garrison Winbury”, a renowned …