Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy

ANORA: THE LATEST FROM SEAN BAKER

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews October 19, 2024

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Sean Baker is one of the brightest and most original filmmakers of his generation. He rates a place in cinematic history for being the first professional to shoot a feature film on an iPhone. That was Tangerine, which was set in and around a Hollywood donut shop. He is fascinated by people who live and sometimes thrive on the fringes of society, well apart from the mainstream. But he doesn’t judge his characters and challenges us to remain open-minded, too. Anora which earned him the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, opens in the midst of a hectic Brooklyn strip club, where a free-roaming camera follows one of its high-energy dancers (“call me Ani”) played by Mikey Madison. In the course of several minutes we…

THE OBLONG BOX

A Bit Of Crumpet October 19, 2024

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Leonard here. The following column is written by my colleague Mark Searby highlighting British cinema past and present. Please enjoy A Bit of Crumpet. Any horror film that brings together icons such as Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Gordon Hessler and Edgar Allen Poe should immediately pique the interest of fans of classic horror movies. Yet The Oblong Box seems to have passed under the radar for many decades since its release in 1969. How can a story about a British aristocrat who locked his disfigured brother away in a tower, only for him to escape and cause havoc in the local town at night be something that hasn’t shown up on horror fans film lists? The simple answer is that while it has some heavyweights in-front…

HIDDEN CITY

A Bit Of Crumpet October 19, 2024

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Leonard here. The following column is written by my colleague Mark Searby highlighting British cinema past and present. Please enjoy A Bit of Crumpet. A name synonymous with premium quality British TV dramas is Stephen Poliakoff. Close My Eyes, Perfect Strangers and Dancing on the Edge are just three of Poliakoff’s much lauded work for British television. Prior to writing for TV, Poliakoff had been crafting stage plays for some of the most legendary London theatres. But by the late 1980s he still had not ventured into feature films except for a one-off of writing Runners (a limited theatrical release in 1983 before being broadcast on Channel 4). Hidden City, filmed in ’87 and released a year later with the same fate as Runners (a limited theatrical…

THE OUTCASTS

A Bit Of Crumpet October 19, 2024

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Leonard here. The following column is written by my colleague Mark Searby highlighting British cinema past and present. Please enjoy A Bit of Crumpet. Long forgotten films are two a penny. But what about films that rarely made it out of their own country? And even then when they were released in their native country they only received a limited theatrical release and then were gone forever? It’s almost like they never existed. The Outcasts, according to folklore, was released in the Republic of Ireland for one week in 1982. It then received a small VHS release a year later. Then had one showing on Britain’s Channel 4 TV channel in 1984. After that, The Outcasts disappears. Until now! Some forty years later we finally get…

Trenque Lauquen and The Agitator

A Bit Of Crumpet October 19, 2024

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Leonard here. The following column is written by my colleague Mark Searby highlighting British cinema past and present. Please enjoy A Bit of Crumpet. Radiance Films are boutique Blu-Ray label out of the UK. They have been running several years now and their output has ranged from arthouse provocateurs to genre classics. It’s run by Fran Simeoni, who used to be director of content at Arrow Films. So, it’s far to say Fran knows his way around a good quality release or two. Trenque Lauquen is one such quality release, and it’s one I’ve been looking forward to seeing for some time. A sprawling four-hour movie set across two parts (and two Blu-Rays) that is in no rush for anyone to tell the story. A story…

THE APPRENTICE: A BIOPIC FOR OUR TIME

In Theaters Leonard Maltin October 13, 2024

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The first thing you should know is that this biopic is not a hatchet job on the former President. It’s a smart, but not smart-alecky, dramatization of his evolution as an entrepreneur and public figure, under the tutelage of the notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn. That relationship is at the core of this film, and its impact may be muted somewhat if you’ve seen Matt Tyrnauer’s excellent 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? (still a must-see, it’s streaming on Prime). The compensation is savoring Jeremy Strong’s uncanny performance as Cohn, the man who embodied the word “contradiction.” He was one of a kind, thank goodness, but he blazed a trail that even he couldn’t have predicted for his protégé. And while Strong has been grabbing most…

FOLIE INDEED: THIS TIME THE JOKE IS ON US

In Theaters Leonard Maltin Movie Reviews October 6, 2024

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What a waste! The only folie (or delusion) in Joker: Folie à Deux is believing that I want to spend quality time with Arthur Fleck, the pathetic figure first played by Joaquin Phoenix in 2019. This time, he meets his match in a groupie (Lady Gaga) who joins him in performing a roster of tunes that might comprise an album called Songs for the Criminally Insane. I don’t need to be reminded what good songs like “Get Happy” and “Bewitched” sound like. I can listen to them anytime and I don’t have to suffer through a turgid drama in the bargain. The only consolation I take is that the song catalogues of such great teams as Burt Bacharach and Hal David or Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley…