THE RETURN OF TANYA TUCKER: FEATURING BRANDI CARLILE
Everyone loves a good comeback story, as witness the current buzz surrounding actor Brendan Fraser, who’s been out of the limelight for a while. Embracing an underdog can seem like a cliché but rekindling a show-business career is no…
TILL: TRANSCENDING THE OBVIOUS
I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Till and being reminded of the horrific fate that befell a 14-year-old black boy in Mississippi back in 1964. I hadn’t reckoned with the worldview of director and co-writer Chinonye Chukyu, who chose not to…
‘ARMAGEDDON TIME’ IS BEAUTIFUL
The ability to remember details and summon emotions from one’s childhood is a gift, especially in the hands of a filmmaker as talented as James Gray. In Armageddon Time he fearlessly lays bare a crucial incident from his adolescence that haunts…
HARPO, HITCHCOCK, AND THE OSCAR: NEW AND NOTABLE BOOKS Oct 2022
SPEAKING OF HARPO by Susan Marx with Robert S. Bader (Applause) As someone who gobbled up every word in Harpo Marx’s memorable autobiography Harpo Speaks, I reveled in this posthumous publication by his widow Susan. Where else in the year 2022…
AMSTERDAM: AN ALMOST-GOOD MOVIE
Look, I get it. It isn’t easy to craft an original screenplay, introducing an audience to newly-minted characters worth caring about, then building a three-act structure that makes perfect sense. David O. Russell has had more success than many…
PRESTON STURGES’ WATERLOO: ‘THE GREAT MOMENT’
You may have overlooked Kino Lorber’s February Blu-ray release of The Great Moment (1944), starring Joel McCrea and Betty Field. It’s not an especially well-known title from the Paramount library, but it inspired Constantine Nasr, who produces bonus content for many…
WHERE FILM BUFFS GET THEIR FILL
When I was a kid my incipient love of film history was fueled by the fact that local TV stations in the New York City area had hours of time to fill and stockpiles of old movies to do…
