Netflix and Beyond

A recent visit to The Metropolitan Museum in New York City introduced me to Juan de Pareja (1606-1670) an Afro-Hispanic painter enslaved by renowned artist Diego Velazquez (1599-1660); Juan, freed in 1650, remarkably talented, was hidden in the shadows of Velazquez until his portrait by said artist was displayed in 1650. “Chevalier” is another example, manifesting “color” has no parameters …

“Gardening is a manipulation of the natural world.” Joel Edgerton gives a perfectly preened performance as “Narvel Roth”, a punctilious horticulturist in charge of dowager’s “Norma Haverhill” (pristinely aged Sigourney Weaver) elegant estate; he is her pawn, carrying out demands both in and outside the mansion. Director Paul Schrader gifts the complicated Roth a robotic intensity: meticulous biographer of floral …

Experiencing this elegiacally exquisite film knowing that no one could have written it without having lived it; religiosity reverberates throughout; “Past Lives” is a hymn, a devoted prayer to bygone loves; remembered souls whose sincerity episodically, flowed in and out of one’s life; the “if only’s” “what if’s” are ubiquitously echoed throughout “Past Lives”, stirring memories, mostly ignored, but awakened …

“One cannot count the moons that shimmer on her roofs/or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.” Saib-e-Tabrizi Two films focusing on the travails of American soldiers and their interpreters in the unchartered, explosive, terrifyingly beautiful landscape of Afghanistan. There is keen edification in both films but Guy Ritchie’s “Covenant” is a more intimate, accurate dissection of the dependency, bond …

Constantly being accused of disliking “comedy”; a subjective art form, admittedly there’s a modicum of truth in the accusation; humor to me must be rib-cracking, mascara running, bladder imperiled; guffawing uncontrollably, lusting for a repetition of the hilarious scene. Movies like Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” or Mel Brooks “The Producers” pass the “funny” test but the stellar, iconic funniest film I …

Penelope Cruz tips the scales in skill and virtuosity in Italian director Emanuele Crialese’s, “L’immensita” (immensity); shadowing his own struggle with gender identity in the 1970’s. It is a film metaphorically nuanced, reminiscent of today’s gender divisive world. “Clara” (Cruz) a dazzling housewife with three children, the oldest “Adriana/Adri” (prodigiously astounding Luana Giuliani) at twelve comfortable in his male identity, …

I have yet to meet anyone who did not love their BlackBerry; I will be in its debt for eternity; it changed my life (which initially, felt ideal), added a freedom impossible to define and pole vaulted me into the internet marvels of the twenty-first century; still nostalgically mourn its loss. Canadian director/actor Matt Johnson’s tragicomedy about the meteoric rise …

The name is the same, but not Georges Bizet’s (1838-1875) renowned Opera that premiered in 1875; instead, Benjamin Millepied (“The Black Swan”), dancer, choreographer, now director, presents his version of a woman who clandestinely steals into the United States from Mexico; Melissa Barrera (“Carmen”) is the heroine with a stricken past, captured by border patroller “Aidan” (Paul Mescal), suffering from …

Saturated with wholehearted poignancy we say goodbye to Mrs. Maisel; more than “marvelous” she possessed a flair for chicanery without guile, a vanity without pomposity, a wittiness without brutishness; Rachel Brosnahan (Miriam Maisel) along with the prescient writing of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, is the quintessential stand-up comedian: unblemished timing, impeccable judgment of her audience, a queen of self-depreciation …

The dashing, dimpled dandy with insouciant, uninhibited charm (Tomer Sisley) masking Shakespearian hubris, behind raffish, rascally wit; one dead wife who perpetually, deliciously, ghostly gives consul, another, a maniacal murderer, the mother of his baby daughter; his forensic genius, laced with aplomb, operates at the sharpest measure, with the aid of the murdered victims (whose dignification he champions) continuously titillating …