Netflix and Beyond

Western movies have never been my favored genre but have experienced and relished the best: “True Grit”, “Shane”, “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid”, “Blazing Saddles”, “Stagecoach”, “High Noon”, “The Magnificent Seven” and the 1991 Oscar winning “Dances with Wolves”, director Kevin Costner took home an Oscar for best director and the film won the best picture of the year. It was outstanding and secured Costner’s …

Living in an urban environment saturated with a legitimate economy, hospitals, all levels of education, schooling those from pre-stage through PH.D’s; thriving residences populated by tax- paying individuals, everything for every need, EXCEPT the constant, plaguing of cacophonous, traumatic, worthless motorcyclists whose sole purpose is to disturb the peace; detestable, disenfranchised, aliens “Bikeriders”; a culture totally incomprehensible (although there are …

For those metaphorical souls and those who are not “Tuesday” is a sublime crash course, a treatise on dying and death; it is not sad or morbid it is just wise, realistic and beautiful. Out of the outrageous, stellar, fecund, fantastical mind of Croatian writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusic comes a film reverberating with the solvency and depth of poets John Donne, …

At times compelling, oftentimes confusing, generally entertaining if you put history aside and just go for theatricality, drama and scintillating intrigue. With an ending of outrageous possibilities. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz tests his proficiency with a foreign scenario; the terminal days of Tudor King Henry VIII (1491-1547) and his sixth and final wife Katherine Parr (1512-1548). Acting transcends a vague …

After close to a two-month hiatus from imbibing in the transformative realm of film I sat forlornly with one other individual watching a documentary of such magnitude and wonder that I wanted to scream in frustration at the lack of attendance; here is an atrocious, catastrophic, historical truth of the past that screechingly resonates today: antisemitism is vibrantly alive, pervasive, …

Peneflix will be on a six-week hiatus. Look forward to posting again on our return!

Director Guy Ritchie has been on a media roll: “The Gentlemen”, Netflix and his latest bombastic extravaganza “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” both stylistically captivating; an exercise in camp, for the sole and unmitigated purpose of entertainment; success is served in spades in duo endeavors. Loosely based on Operation Postmaster, Winston Churchill’s desperate design to cripple the Nazi war efforts, …

Actor Matthew Modine is stratospherically stunning as a social worker manufacturing a world of possibilities, a world where the disenfranchised, downtrodden, overlooked can soar, bad boys whose behavior has cornered them in an irredeemable state, with little hope of resurrection. Coach Greg Townsend (Modine) doffs platitudinous presumptions and trains four juveniles to quash the 760 miles between Denver and the …

Dev Patel has accomplished the pristine blending of east and west films aka Bollywood and Hollywood, remarkable on a myriad of levels. The Bollywood genre has fast-tracked in mimicry, imitation of Hollywood’s 6 pack ab heroes, following the trope of: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise vs. Akshay Kumar, Hrithik Roshan, Shah Rukh Khan. Patel with keen ingenuity follows the …

Over the weekend I binged watched a trio of Ripley movies  (skipping “Ripley’s Game” and “Ripley Under the Ground”) that novelist Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) wrote and lionized “Tom Ripley” a pernicious psychotic with a pleasant façade and amoral core. Commencing with Netflix’s “Ripley” starring Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”), an eight- episode, compelling study of a man who looks …