‘THE RUINS OF LIFTA’ OFFERS FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The Ruins of Lifta offers a thoughtful, multi-layered depiction of contemporary Israeli-Palestinian relations, now playing in New York and Los Angeles. Once upon a time, Lifta was a small village located by the western entrance to…
REAL OR NOT: DEEPWATER HORIZON
It’s difficult to know how to respond to Deepwater Horizon. As a disaster movie, it follows all the tenets of the genre and gives us the excitement and heroism we expect. But as a real-life story that involves people who…
TIM BURTON IS RIGHT AT HOME WITH MISS PEREGRINE
If there were ever a property tailor-made for director Tim Burton, it’s Ransom Riggs’ best-selling novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The author (a lifelong Burton fan) was inspired to write his dark fable after he began collecting…
A WORLD OF DISCOVERY AT FANTASTIC FEST
If you didn’t know better you might think that an event called Fantastic Fest simply shows horror, sci-if and fantasy films, attracting a crowd of geeky genre fans. What makes this annual gathering in Austin, Texas so special is…
TV Review: Stranger Things (2016)
A lot has already been said about the Duffer Brothers’ sci-fi hit Stranger Things—connecting its ’80s setting to such films as Goonies, Stand By Me and E.T.—and its addictive, what-is-that-sinister-organization-up-to plot line. Unless I missed something,…
THE LESS-THAN-MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
If you’ve never seen a Western before, Hollywood’s latest effort to revive the genre may divert and even entertain you. After all, Denzel Washington is good, as always, Chris Pratt has some funny lines, and all the superficial ingredients…
HOLLYWOOD SPEAKS FRENCH: UNDISCOVERED RADIO DISCS
The history of movies and radio repeatedly intertwine, as I discovered when I wrote my book The Great American Broadcast. At no time was this more apparent than the 1940s, when all of Hollywood worked together to support the…
