Category: Movies

After sweeping the Directors, Producers, and Screen Actors Guild Awards, as well as the Golden Globes and Spirit Awards, Everything Everywhere All at Once was a shoo-in for Best Picture. Nominated in eleven categories, it won seven, including Director, Actress, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, and Editing. All Quiet on the Western Front had…

Emily is $70,000 in debt with college loans. Each time a job looks promising, the background check with her felony conviction, crushes her chances. She struggles at a Door Dash-like job. She storms out of an interview for an assistant designer position after it turns out to be an unpaid internship. A fellow food deliverer…

It’s 1952 and eight-year-old Sammy Fabelman is heading to the big, dark movie theater with his parents. Cecil B Demille’s circus spectacle, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” is on the marquee. Sammy is mesmerized throughout the movie, but it’s the pile-up train crash done with miniatures that forever opens his eyes wide open. He asks…

An Oscar for The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Nominated for The Help and Zero Dark Thirty. Lead roles in Miss Sloane, Molly’s Game, A Most Violent Year, Interstellar, It: Chapter Two, and The Martian. What do they all have in common? Jessica Chastain. Versatile indeed, a wide range of roles portraying strong, flawed women often…

First, my October 7, 2022 weekend trip to L.A. celebrated a 100th anniversary (see previous post New Order & Pet Shop Boys: A Hollywood Bowl Synthsation) and then the next day a one-year birthday for what will become another L.A. cultural institution. After years of dreaming and planning, the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum opened…

Never thought I’d rave about a relative unknown actor while questioning Tom Hanks’ performance. But that’s the undeniable conclusion after seeing Elvis; Baz Luhrmann’s (The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge) glitzy, amped-up rock biopic. Butler is a tour de force as Elvis, particularly in his gyrating heyday. There’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on and the…

I’m not the right person for a superhero movie best-of list. While I enjoyed Black Panther, Wonder Woman, Iron Man, early Spider-Man and Superman, and particularly the Dark Knight Batman trilogy, much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is a mystery to me. I haven’t seen any of the Avengers, Captain America, Deadpool, Thor, Doctor…

Since I missed its premier on the National Geographic Channel and don’t have Disney+, I haven’t seen The Rescue, a 2021 documentary from filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (see Post-Olympics Letdown? Try Rowing and Climbing for a review of their death-defying Free Solo). So, I was glad to see Ron Howard’s new feature…

Dinosaurs. They roamed the earth two hundred million plus years ago, were wiped out in a mass extinction, and have fascinated us since the first fossils were discovered in the early 19th century. The term “dinosaur,” meaning “terrible lizard,” was coined by Richard Wright in 1841. Later, fossil records showed that birds are actually feathered…