Netflix and Beyond

Everyone has favorites; some never waver in their choices; most of us are a thousand percent that we are correct. As I watched the Golden Globe Awards, groaning at some of the winners, questioning the reasoning of the judges, wondering if they had seen all of the films, feeling bewildered, chagrined, massively disappointed as my favorites were felled by what …

Russell Crowe, sporting the banged “Nero” look, plays the slimy, mendacious, feckless Mayor of New York City, running for re-election; it will take years to erase Crowe’s insipid performance in  “Les Miserables” ; gone is the grit of “John Nash” in “A Beautiful Mind”, poignancy of “James Braddock” in “Cinderella Man” or the  mettle, dignity of “The Gladiator”. Disguising his …

Vigilante brigade strives to rid Los Angles of its Jewish mobster, “Mickey Cohen”; a plastic caricature by Sean Penn. It is 1949 and a corps of terrific actors comprise the “squad”; they had to have had a riotous time making this “B” movie about lawless LA and cops gone rogue, cauterizing Cohen’s notorious cabal of amoral thugs. If you are …

Kathryn Bigelow has scored again (“The Hurt Locker”) with this meticulous, intricate scenario of the decade long hunt and slaying of the world’s most sought after terrorist, Osama Bin Laden; she is religious in depicting the reality of the quest and CIA operative “Maya’s” intransigent dedication to finding this heinous villain. Jessica Chastain gives a quietly explosive performance as a …

Every role, every life’s lesson prepared Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant to depict the tragic demise of “Anne” and “Georges”; a classically beautiful, harmonious marriage suffocated by horrific, debilitating circumstances. Director and screenwriter Michael Haneke (“The White Ribbon”) uses these two inimitable actors to paint a devastating portrait of the effects of a stroke on cultured, intellectual, “Anne”, her caregiver, …

After 20 films, all comprising a bovine blob, sloshing simultaneously in my beleaguered brain, recognizing a need for a stimulus-free void to synthesize, analyze, masticate and separate the mediocre from the sublime; arriving home to the Academy Award nominations, exhausted, exhilarated, energized by the electric, enticing, exciting, imaginative world of cinema, knowing its ubiquity will never cease to overwhelm and …

HAPPIEST OF NEW YEAR’S TO ALL MY DEVOTED SUBSCRIBERS. YOUR COMMENTS, INSIGHTS NEVER CEASE TO BRING ME JOY, WISDOM AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING MINUTES. FILM CONSTANTLY BROADENS HORIZONS, WARMS THE HEART, CHALLENGES CONCEPTIONS, KEEPING THE ARTERIES OPEN AND THE MIND ELASTIC. THANK YOU! BE ON THE ALERT FOR MINI REVIEWS OF WHAT TO AVOID OR SEEK OUT IN THE MAGICAL REALM OF …

There are times when the comfort of predictability, a cocoon of complacency is the perfect anecdote in a season of massive doses of mayhem, morbidity, dismemberment and destruction. “Promised Land” is the fare, pabulum, alleviating the the gloom of “Les Miz,” “Django Unchained”; a dose of “fracking” (a combination of water, sand and chemicals, hydraulically drilled into the ground to …

Unmitigated, gruesome violence, guts and gore resonate throughout Quentin Tarantino’s 1858 saga of an unshackled slave “Django” (incredible, brilliant performance by Jamie Foxx) and his associate Dr.King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, genius informs his every role) as they roll through bigoted, slavery -infested South; bounty hunters; ignoring the “alive” and focusing on the “dead” portion of the “wanted” poster. The deftness, …

Possibly, it is too much of a good thing, like the last piece of pizza, third glass of wine, fourth chocolate chip cookie but after seeing the play twice, listening and loving the sound track through the decades, I  could not muster the enthusiasm, expressed by the masses for the spectacular film version of “Les Miz”. It was too long, …