Hollywood

Johnny Depp is captivating, mesmerizing as satanic James “Whitey” Bulger, Boston’s quintessential crime and drug sovereign in the 1970’s-80’s; warped dictator of the “Winter Hill Gang”.  Director Scott Cooper’s “Black Mass” is imbued with hefty performances from Joel Edgerton, as untoward FBI agent, John Connolly; Kevin Bacon, a righteous FBI agent, Charles McGuire; Benedict Cumberbatch, minimally used as Billy Bulger …

M. Night Shyamalan, has captured his elusive groove, and audiences can shiver, viewing his tantalizing, titillating tale of two charming, disarming, precocious teenagers going to visit their maternal grandparents; Mom’s (Kathryn Hahn) estranged parents, longing to finally meet their genetic-connection. Fifteen-year-old “Becca” (sensational, stunning Olivia DeJonge) in the embryonic phase as a documentarian, films the entire excursion from commencement to …

Documentarian, Alex Gibney’s  brazen honesty and prescience, gifts viewers the “good, bad, and ugly” dimensions of Steve Jobs; “adopted visionary”, iconoclastic, unconventional genius; a man whose passing was mourned globally (1956-2011); since his death, his aura has exceeded mythic proportions; an exceptional man whose ambition and lust for technological advancement has changed the world and how we thrive in it …

Heart-arresting, thrillingly beautiful, positively poignant documentary focusing on three men’s obsession with the ultimate peak, “shark’s fin” Meru Mountain; a spiritual, 21,000 foot behemoth in Gharwal, Himalaya, India. Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk, disparate personalities linked by their super-human skills in scaling the most inflexible, hostile of mountains; even more amazing is filming their death-defying pilgrimage; “Meru” is …

Stephen and Alex (also directed) Kendrick, writers of the surprisingly sensational, low-budget film “War Room” are comforted by audiences’ approval of a movie that bludgeons with its monumental religious message: cease judging others, accept Jesus in your heart and hearth, cast out evil; only then may you join the ranks of the righteous. The “war room” is a metaphor for …

What I loved about this film was the lack of delineated suppositions; jarring, irritating, strident anomalies, whining, troubled, pressured protagonists; subterfuge, cataclysmic reversals; vampires and troubled teens; it was comforting, cozy watching septuagenarians stepping beyond their “years” , questing one more athletic accomplishment before relegating their dreams, unfulfilled fantasies, to the dormitory of life’s regrets. Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, …

Preposterous plot, nonetheless compelling, riveting; manipulative, exploitive; sensationalistic, exaggerated from commencement to conclusion. “Jack Dwyer”, having bombed in his profession in the US, drags his family to some unnamed Southeast Asian country, where he is hired, by a mega- corporation, to purify their water supply; neglecting to delve into the xenophobia of the population, they arrive in the middle of …

“Sweet”, a word I’ve always shied away from (except when referring to dessert); rhyming with “meek”, “tweak”, “geek”, “reek” , just a wishy-washy word lacking pungency or redolence. “Learning to Drive” (based on an article written by Katha Pollitt) has changed my perspective on sweetness and its properties. Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley shine as student and teacher in the …

Wondrous words, haywire hilarity, auspicious acting imbue writer/director Paul Weitz’s “Grandma” with a treasure trove of entertainment. Lily Tomlin as “Elle”, a bitingly brilliant poet; a woman whose partner of thirty-eight- years “Violet” has been dead for over a year; we meet Elle as she is caustically casting out her latest paramour, “Olivia” (Judy Greer); any hope of revival shrivels …

Almost thirty years ago this powerfully pungent, redolent, avant garde musical genre slammed our audio landscape; I found it salacious, inciting, and pejorative; “rap” predicted to fizzle and fade, surprisingly has entrenched and defined a culture so many shunned.  “Straight Outta Compton” is a terrific biopic of young, gutsy, talented boys, from Compton, Ca. where youth is ephemeral, strangled by …