Hollywood

Brilliant, profoundly, even squeamishly honest; Roger Ebert’s life (1942-2013) is splayed across the screen; redolent of a life pungently, passionately imbibed;  almost singlehandedly he elevated the art of film to the celestial; uncompromising, through vicissitudes, heartache, glory he “did it his way”. Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) and Mr. Ebert gift audiences a documentary, that regardless of one’s attraction to movies, …

Melissa McCarthy is an intelligent woman with impeccable comedic timing; together with her husband, Ben Falcone (he also directed and plays her boss “Keith”) she wrote and stars in “Tammy”, a movie that elicits little laughter and lots of disappointment; the first twenty minutes she harangues anyone and anything within hearing distance; she has created a cult to corpulence,  and …

A film within a film within a film; resulting in diaphanous characterization; twisted scenarios, locations bouncing from Paris, Rome, New York City, even the most prescient will be challenged to follow the route to perdition.  Guilt- ridden men, whining, mournful women, director Paul Haggis’s  (“Crash”) convoluted, enervating plot leads to dissatisfaction, frustration and in the end, absolutely bereft of concern …

The 2005 Broadway, award-winning, biographical musical about the rise and plummet of the “Four Seasons” , anchored by high-pitched crooner Frankie Valli, falls flat on the big screen; lacking the authenticity, originality and “all that jazz” of the play, it ploddingly, superficially portrays the accelerated ascent of New Jersey petty thieves, to icons of musical notoriety; plastic, shallow depictions, identical …

Australian director David Michod’s (“Animal Kingdom”) “The Rover” drills into the psyche of the damned; set in post-apocalyptic Australia. “Eric” (magnetically, fierce portrayal by Guy Pearce) whose sole mission is to retrieve his stolen car, partners with wounded “Ray” (pivotal, powerful, performance by Robert Pattinson), a stuttering, febrile, minimally- challenged psychopath, whose brother is one of the car thieves. This …

Prevalent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the “morality play”;  allegories, where the protagonists personified moral attributes; the themes were infused with religious gravity, one was granted the freedom of choice, hence the moral dilemma, which highway led to the celestial, or the dungeon of the doomed. “How to Train Your Dragon 2” is an animated, sophisticated, contemporary spin …

How fortunate for movie-goers that “desperate times, demand desperate measures”; destitute town of Tickle Cove,(Newfoundland) mourning an exsanguinated fishing industry; demoralized inhabitants living on welfare, needing a doctor in order to qualify for a major “petro chemical byproduct reprocessing plant”; what ensues is a warm, enchanting adult fairy tale; incredible casting lends prismatic charm to an unlikely scenario. Brendan Gleeson, …

Praying for early onslaught Alzheimer’s or minimal short-term memory loss, drastic measures to annihilate the effects of this homage to beggarly taste. “Donna” (giggling, “childish” Jenny Slate) is a stand -up comic in a run- down bar in Brooklyn; the film commences with a graphic description of her every biological function; prurient prattle about her intimacies, from boyfriend to underwear. …

“A picture is a poem without words.” Horace Juliette Binoche and Clive Owen shimmer as academics at a small prep school in Maine; “Dina Delsanto” is a renown artist debilitated by rheumatoid arthritis, enlisted to instruct gifted art students; “Jack Marcus”, a published author, teaches Honors English; living off past plaudits, a succinct wordsmith, cursed with a lethal hobby of …

Tom Cruise. For thirty years I have been a worshiper, a devout member of congregation “Cruisology”; “Risky Business” (1983) was my baptismal inauguration; here is a man with more avatars than Vishnu: lover, pilot, lawyer,  lover, football player, bartender, lover, gambler, samurai,  lover, vampire, rock star; endless characterizations.  But it is his role as super-hero that has monopolized his mega …