MIKE WALLACE IS HERE
As energetic as its subject, Avi Belkin’s propulsive new documentary profiles the veteran broadcaster who became infamous for his hard-hitting interviews and “gotcha” segments on 60 Minutes. Because Wallace came of age with the birth of television and remained…
ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD
If it’s true that the devil is in the details, Quentin Tarantino has done his devilish best to transport us back in time fifty years for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, his latest mélange of fact and fiction. From the…
THE AMAZING CHARLEY BOWERS IS DISCOVERED—AGAIN
In the early 1980s I attended the Ottawa Animation Festival, where I saw a handful of silent shorts that blew me away. These ingenious films blended meticulous stop-motion work with live-action slapstick. The man who made and starred in…
SCARFACE, CAPTAIN AHAB, AND KING KONG: GREAT READING
Normally I review only film-related books on this site, but I’ve just devoured two volumes written by friends that I can’t resist writing about. One is a work of fiction, the other non-fiction. When I finished reading them I…
SWORD OF TRUST: LIGHT AND SATISFYING
I enjoy Lynn Shelton’s work overall but I think Sword of Trust is her best feature to date. It doesn’t seem like an improv-based film at all; it plays as well as a scripted comedy but manages to retain an air…
STUBER: START MAKING SENSE
A good comedy has to have structure, just like a dramatic film, and should possess some degree of logic. It can be internal logic, once the movie has established its concept and boundary lines, but it still has to…
THE FAREWELL: A SLEEPER THAT CROSSES BOUNDARIES
For her second feature, up-and-coming writer-director Lulu Wang has drawn on her own experiences to craft a touching story of a Chinese family, told from the point of view of a young Americanized woman who returns to her homeland…
