Hollywood

Director Joanna Rudnick’s remarkable iconoclastic commentary on traditional, expected norms of beauty: thin, waif-like, gauntly-chiseled countenances, leggy models who grace the covers of fashion magazines are replaced, shattered by the inimitable photographer Rick Guidotti who sees beyond the facade and unearths, brings forth the gorgeousness of those with physical aberrations; “disfigured” by Albinism, hypo –pigmentation, Sturge-Weber syndrome and chromosome 18 …

A strange phenomena occurs while watching three to four films a day; similarities, idiosyncrasies, poetic ploys, resonate as they would not under normal viewing circumstances: smoking informs approximately 80% of the films, regardless of the country they represent; cell phones, despite the direness of living conditions, are a major tool of contemporary filmmakers (“Timbuktu”);  child stars are a prime, compelling …

Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) wrote “Miss Julie” in 1888; son of a bankrupt aristocrat and a waitress, his troubled and tumultuous childhood infused his remarkable writings, none more so than “Miss Julie”; a play resonating with class warfare, misogyny, “hysteria” (a Victorian reference to female sexual frustration), borderline schizophrenia; shocking fodder for a straight-laced society at the turn of …

Watching this fine, outstanding film one word kept galloping through my mind; every scene, each performance; pristine, prescient directing was laden with “integrity”; two hours of blatant honesty, infused with genealogical, unresolved issues; personal and professional trials, patterns of pain, anchored in years of obfuscation, segregation. The audience voyeuristically watches as the Palmer family flays the past, confronting the present,  …

Religiously faithful to Gillian Flynn’s stunningly successful novel; an unmatched character study of an initially enviable relationship gone haywire; succinctly directed and cast, even those familiar with the book will be drawn into the labyrinth of irreducible intrigue. David Fincher scores again (“The Social Network”, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) with a scenario, pervasively known, blessing it with layers …

Accidentally, I ventured into this enchanting fantasy about a disillusioned psychiatrist, confronting the monotony of his everyday, vacuous  existence; compulsively organized, his home and patients, robotically relegated into slots of predictability. Simon Pegg is marvelous as the befuddled “shrink”; he exits his formal, prestigious English domain, travels the globe on an amorphous expedition, looking for answers to the elusive, inconclusive …

Based on the play by Israel Horovitz (also his directorial debut) is uneven in execution but stunningly acted by Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas. Penniless, “Mathias (Jim) Gold” (Kline) arrives in Paris to collect his inheritance from his deceased father; an apartment inhabited by ninety-two-year-old “Madame Girard” (Smith); discovering the incomprehensible French law of “viager” which allows …

My fervent regret is that I did not LEAVE after the first twenty minutes, when I realized that the entire “Altman” family was catastrophically boring, self-absorbed, inconsequential; their common denominator, an obsessive, insatiable,  all-consuming focus on their libido. With the exception of a charming child (whose parentage was vague) I woefully sat through the entire dull scenario, which disintegrated scene …

Earlier this year the film “Locke” exploded on the screen; Tom Hardy, the tragic protagonist, is monumentally overwhelming as the unfortunate, but accountable “Ivan Locke’; an isolated, solitary tour de force, rarely seen by movie- goers. Hardy’s scope as an actor has yet to be realized; but once again he excavates his treasure-trove of talent and blesses audiences with “Bob”, …

Earlier this week I viewed an abysmal film about a dysfunctional family in distress (“This is Where I Leave You”: to be reviewed 9/18/14); so it was with minor trepidation that I willingly subjected myself to another family in the throes of a crisis; the difference is remarkable. Kristin Wiig and Bill Hader give performances, resonating with greatness, especially Hader …