Netflix and Beyond

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you; but my choices were: “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”, “Green Lantern”, “Kung Fu Panda”.  I was ultimately satisfied with my decision. This collaboration between J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg is terrific; their imaginative powers whip up a perfect concoction of magic, mayhem and genuine believability. It is 1979 and a group of adolescents, filming their …

If you were fortunate to have seen the trailers; choose another flick to visit. There were no secrets to discover nor surprises to behold; boredom prevailed. You have a father/ son team; Hal, (Christopher Plummer) and Oliver, (Ewan McGregor); Hal at seventy-five has rambunctiously exited the “closet” and now romping in an alternate lifestyle, denied in his prime; Plummer is …

A marriage adrift; two islands floating on a river of miscommunication, passion suffocated by the repetition of the mundane; a child away for the first time;  his cohesiveness, the acrylic holding the unit together missing, only adding to the nothingness, meaningless moments of a hardly endured existence of never looking or seeing the partner, the co-creator of the “beautiful boy.” …

The heat index was flirting with a perfect 100 degrees or I would never have ventured outside my comfort zone to attend this film; now I must bless that hellishly hot day for my initiation into the fantastic world of mutants, telepaths, “angels” and “demons”. Oh, what a baptism it was! This was a maiden voyage, virginal in its ignorance: …

Terrence Mallick has created this gargantuan memorial for a lost brother; a portrait of pain, suffering so horrifically torturous, purgatorial to experience, yet there are moments of excruciating beauty, freezing one’s breath, speeding one’s heart. This practically script- less film is based on the premise that there two paths to follow in life, one of peace the other, nature; the …

Yes, I was the hooded, shaded, crouching lump of barely- breathing humanity in the last row. My fear of being sighted was fictional, the next senior person was no more than thirty! Why did I venture into this mindless fluff? Because two super intelligent friends told me I should not miss it; they were correct; I have ceaselessly been intellectually …

A huge “thank you” to Bea, Cathy, Laura, Nancy, Sheila, for insisting that I travel to a run –down, dilapidated theatre , outside my zip code to see this inspirational documentary about a simple man, happily bonded, partnered to his trade: a street photographer. Like Basquiat who used the walls of New York as his canvas, Bill Cunningham, armed with …

I was nineteen years old, a student in Rome, Italy when I disembarked from a twenty hour train ride from Rome to Paris. It was November, the middle of the night and raining; my friends and I danced, sang and ran through the glorious, glistening, naked, water-dappled Parisian streets, battered valises in tow; I had never tasted such joy, such …

This visually lush film takes place in France at the commencement of the eight wars (1562-98) waged between the Catholics and the Huguenots (anyone not Catholic: Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist). A byproduct of the Council of Trent (1545-63) in which the Catholic Church condemns the heresies of the Protestants.  I would have preferred a plot focusing on the warring factions, their …

Returning from twelve dazzling, sun-dappled, art infested days in Rome and Florence, submitting to my remedy for jet lag, movies. I could not have chosen two more diametrically different themes; both worthy of four stars. “Cost of a Soul” is morbidly depressing, but brutally realistic. Sean Kirkpatrick has given birth to the quintessential “Murphy’s Law” film; two soldiers back from …