Hollywood

PERSUASION (NETFLIX)             Novelist Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) “Persuasion” has survived a myriad of adaptations, many excellent, especially the 2007 version starring Sally Hawkins, Rupert Penry-Jones, Tobias Menzies; the 2022 Netflix rendition is an abomination; miscast, instead of electrifying, disastrously boring, using contemporary actors of all hues, squirming in their restrictive wardrobes, stilted dialogue, sprinkled with platitudeness cliches permeating an emotionless, limited scenario. Dakota Johnson’s (“50 Shades” celeb) valiant struggle …

Delia Owens novel was a sensational bestseller and one that I felt poetically matched its epic core and empathetically, the story of isolated creativity; “Kya, The Marsh Girl” pulsates with prodigious spirit, steadfastness and intelligence, a study of survival in the untrammeled marshlands of North Carolina. Daisy Edgar Jones inherently captures the cunning purity of an abandoned, shunned young woman, …

Seeing these two films back-to-back, pulsating comparisons begged exploration. Not a Marvel maven but a devotee of mythology, “Thor” resonated superficially on the mythological level, but incredibly jejune, silly and shallow when attempting to wallow in the present; director Taika Waititi’s  (“Jojo Rabbit”) Thor, lacks the luster of his previous works and seems to have lost its way between Mt. …

“INTIMACY”              (SPANISH: DUBBED ENGLISH)         NETFLIX A timely tale resonating with today’s invasive and chilling technology; a rising politician is surreptitiously filmed as she and her lover are carnally entwined on a deserted beach. Predictably, it goes viral, and the series evolves as the protagonists gallantly fight to resolve and cope …

Elvis Presley (1935-1977) torpedoed the music genre with the same iconoclasm  Andy Warhol (1928-1987) dealt to the art world, blasting the suited-singers, framed paintings, eliminating boundaries, bulldozing the norm and excavating a future never envisioned. Director Baz Luhrmann (“The Great Gatsby”) with his lavishly excessive style unveils the genius of a young white boy saturated in gospel, jazz, rhythm-and-blues, a …

“PEAKY BLINDERS” 6TH SEASON   NETFLIX In my estimation this season tops the others in writing, intense characterization and the effects of moral turpitude; Cillian Murphy, redolently ripe as “Tommy Shelby” sears as a man plagued by his misdeeds, its consequences, and religious retribution; farfetched, but reeks of legitimacy and the power of the mind to transcend reality. FOUR STARS!!!! …

Doris Kearns Goodwin is the quintessential historian; with remarkable intelligence, insight and ultimate comprehension, she masters the lives, initiatives, goals, achievements of all her subjects: Abraham Lincoln (“Team of Rivals”), Franklin Roosevelt (& Eleanor)(“No Ordinary Time”) Lyndon Johnson (“And the American Dream”); it is the “Bully Pulpit”, focusing on Theordore Roosevelt (1858-1919) and his extraordinary life that Goodwin documents in …

As a lifelong Tom Cruise fan, (“Risky Business” and “Born on the Fourth of July” sealed my devotion) I went full throttle, excited to the max, without trepidation to the first showing of “Top Gun: Maverick”; happily, my expectations were not only met, but wildly surpassed. I loved the film from the onset; it is magnificent and must be experienced in the theatre. Jeffrey …

Having never visited the popular series of the inimitable Crawley family, I judge the films as entities totally without preconceived intimacy of the characters; possibly unfair, but films take precedence above and beyond the world of television (which I also admire). I found 2019’s “Downton Abbey” rather abysmal, apart from Maggie Smith as matriarch “Violet Crawley”; since her riveting Academy …

“VORTEX”  Dedicated “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts”; directed by Gasper Noe, “Vortex”, filmed as a diptych, a metaphor for the bifurcation of two lives, once entwined, now irrevocably fractured by age and its devastating vicissitudes; a husband and wife, “Liu” and “Elle” (incomparable Dario Argento and Francoise Lebrun) navigating the once familiar, now foreign, unknown …