Netflix and Beyond

Immersive perfection graces Bradley Cooper’s cloning of Composer/Conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990); elegiac in deportment, dazzling depth, Cooper as star, producer, director oozes with the “blood, sweat and tears” of a rarefied genius, a polymath whose skill, innovation conquered the galaxy, anchored eternally in the stratospheric. “Maestro” without apology, spotlights Bernstein’s sexuality; in essence the man had a gargantuan capacity to …

Napoleon Bonapart (1764-1821) a man of military might, gifted France the Napoleonic Code of Law, still in existence today; established higher education, a central bank and a street and sewer system. So why in the name of filmdom did director Ridley Scott and actor Joaquin Phoenix depict his life as a cartoonish, blubbering, foppish dolt? Phoenix (Academy Award, “The Joker”, …

Tantalizingly, titillatingly twisted; Emerald Fennell accomplishes the hat trick as writer, producer, director with a film guaranteed to hibernate for eons in one’s memory; there are scenes shockingly deplorable but fittingly apropos of the major protagonist “Oliver Quick”, Barry Keoghan’s (“Banshees of Inisherin”) staggering performance, guaranteed to rival Cillian Murphy’s (“Oppenheimer”  and Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro”) at this year’s Academy Awards; …

Priscilla Ann Wagner (b. May 24th, 1945); her biological father James Wagner, was killed in a plane crash shortly after her birth; she was raised by her mother Ann and stepfather Paul Beaulieu, an officer in the Air Force; the question will always niggle as to why her parents allowed her at the age of fourteen, to date a man …

Michael Fassbender depicts a nameless assassin in David Fincher’s portrait of a man legitimizing his job as a soulless, “blinkless”, philosophical killer; basically, narrating his process and the skill, diligence, conditioned body and mind required of his proficiency; an avowed nihilist but not above quoting Christ, his faux sanctimoniousness cannot cleanse his bloody deeds. His mantra, redundantly pervasive is focused …

“THE HOLDOVERS”            IN THEATRES Poignantly predictable, two contradictory characters (“Professor Paul Hunham”, Paul Giamatti, and student “Angus”, Dominick Sessa), lock horns over a Christmas holiday at a boy’s boarding school; it is 1970 and director Alexander Payne remains true to the era; Giamatti’s curmudgeonly, warm and wonderful performance as a brilliant, flawed ancient civilizations teacher, …

Watching, this more than watchable film, percolating throughout, director Justine Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari’s (Triet’s husband) premise is the disparity in a relationship, a marriage, a partnership that over a period, success favors one party over the other; “A Star is Born” with a myriad of redundant remakes, echoes the demise of the male protagonist disintegrating with his partner’s …

Taylor Swift, 33 years old, 5’11, more than a Brand, Meme, is a contemporary, effulgent, Megastar; her palpable, preeminent genius in composing, singing, dancing, instrumentalist, transcends the anticipated, soaring into a “Swift” realm, unimaginable, indescribable to a seasoned adult who, apart from her name, was startlingly innocent of her heuristic acuity. More than a film, concert, the Eras (an epoch) …

“In the early 1920s, Osage Indians where the richest people, per capita, on the planet.” Director Martin Scorsese’s ambitious, masterfully pointed epic brings to the fore the egregious, manipulative murders perpetrated (for profit) on a tribe that inhabited oil rich land; calculated killings of those Indians, whose marriages to white spouses, gifted the survivors of the deceased, a preordained inheritance. …

Director Jonathan Glazer has accomplished the remarkable in his adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel of the same title (which bears little resemblance to Amis’s script).  The film resonates, pierces the psyche, transcends the scenario, adept performances, it sears redolently with the SOUND of the unimaginable; eyes shut, the soundtrack bleats with symphonic chords of horror, annihilation, ethnic elimination; Mica Levi’s …