“I have a thing about strays.”
Who would have predicted, in the fifty-plus years since Adam West first donned the cape and cowl in 1966, how pervasive super-hero culture would dominate American entertainment? Robert Pattinson joins a growing coterie of actors who have delved into the duality of Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves’ highly anticipated rehash, ‘The Batman,’ one of the few treatments which correctly calibrates how genre can be used as a tool of subversion rather than propaganda. In…
“When you have money, no one is ever really your friend.”
Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of ‘Death on the Nile’ begins with a sequence that is miles removed from Agatha Christie: indeed, it feels like Branagh has spliced in a lost reel from ‘1917.’ In an unbroken take, his camera snakes through a World War I-era foxhole, ending with the delivery of orders for a suicide mission. But maybe not. A young farmer and solider, Hercule Poirot (played by a de-aged…
“The slow burn, who gets under your skin, that’s way more rare. That’s your airplane safety mask person.”
A break-up romcom in the ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ vein: one that trades primarily in the end of relationships rather than beginnings. As a result, it’s more gently and occasionally funny than a laugh-out-loud riot. In places, it’s even a bit of a bummer. The first half-hour, in which Peter (Charlie Day) and Emma (Jenny Slate), two happily taken strangers, find themselves unceremoniously…
“It’s going to be a long night.”
Set in a remote location on a snowy evening, Damien Power’s ‘No Exit’ looks eerily similar to Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ - you remember, the one where a group of suspicious ne’er-do-wells is waiting for a storm to pass, each with their own sinister personality quirks and roguish mannerisms. Except ‘No Exit’ lacks the star power and is missing several ingredients: chief among them an engaging central mystery, snappy dialogue, and a…
“You were looking for the key for years, but the door was always open.”
Economic crisis. Sweeping statements about a country and its culture, polarized by income inequality. An unreliable, bootstrapping narrator. Mercifully, this isn’t ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’ “The White Tiger,” Aravind Adiga’s bestseller, was a riveting satire when it dropped towards the tail end of the 2008 financial crisis and a modern look at India with far more bite than the Dickensian ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ which came out a mere month…
“Can you guess what every woman’s worst nightmare is?”
There is a scene, about midway through ‘Promising Young Woman,’ Emerald Fennell’s eye-shattering zeitgeist-inspired response to the #MeToo movement, in which a man pulls his truck next to our heroine, Cassie (Carey Mulligan), and throws a few choice words her way, including the one you really shouldn’t lob at a young woman at the end of her rope. (You know the one). Scored to Wagner’s darkly epic piece “Liebestod,” Cassie gets…
