Reviews WONDER WOMAN. As much as we shouldn’t have to be talking about gender or gender inequality anymore, recent events support the notion that we do. Plodding progress continues to be made but the threat of a systemic course reversal looms. As we plunge blindly into the middle of the 21st century, humanity ought to […]
Minor Theatre
Posted inArts + Scene
Swim at Your Own Risk
Reviews BAYWATCH. Who, really, is to blame when something terrible like this happens? And I say “to blame” rather than “responsible” because there are a great number of responsible parties, from grips to craft services, who share in the responsibility of bringing a movie to the screen. And despite their pivotal role in the collaborative […]
Posted inArts + Scene
I’m With Her
Reviews ALIEN: COVENANT. I saw Ridley Scott’s ground-breaking Alien (1979) too young and imprinted on its visceral sci-fi horror like a duckling. Artist H.R. Giger, whose work calls to mind an Art Nouveau death cult, designed a beast that finally frightened us more than humans. Its oil-slick, black, eyeless bullet of a head, with its […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Throwaway Throwbacks
Reviews SNATCHED. When Amy Schumer, building on the success both of her stand-up comedy and subversive, hilarious TV show Inside Amy Schumer, made her first foray into the Hollywood mainstream, she did it like a cagey pro. Teaming with director Judd Apatow, starring and working from her own screenplay, she came out with Trainwreck (2015). […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Family Messes
Reviews THE DINNER. Elliptical awkwardness isn’t everybody’s thing and that’s understandable. In real life, it’s almost nobody’s thing, and those who enjoy it are challenging to be around, to say the least. But cinematically, a sort of rootless discomfiture can go a long way toward establishing tone, serving story and locating characters in context. Such […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Big Girls, Big Brothers
THE CIRCLE. Where have all the techno-thrillers gone? I began to wonder this after my disappointing afternoon with The Circle. I claim to be no expert in the subgenre, but the ’80s and ’90s were rife with paranoid thought experiments about the cyberworld we were creating. Did we peak at The Matrix? Perhaps 9/11 brought […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Running for Cover
Reviews THE PROMISE. And so we revisit the conundrum of the historical drama, tangled with as recently as last week regarding The Zookeeper’s Wife. Again, a movie takes as its setting a horrific 20th century catastrophe — this time the outbreak of World War I and the Armenian genocide — and attempts to capture a […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Escape/Escapism
REVIEWS THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE. Period drama can, and in this case does, provide a respite from the breakneck editing and handheld camerawork that have subsumed the modern cinematic lexicon. It can give its creators an opportunity to focus on details of set design and costuming and language that, in a contemporary setting, might not merit […]
Posted inStories
Golden Age
To walk through the grand polished-wood and etched-glass doors of the Minor Theatre is to straddle the past and the future. Staircases descend into the small, warmly appointed lobby, filled with ornate items from a bygone era: historic photos, a grandfather clock and a typewriter on which customers peck out cheery thoughts and poems. The […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Cringeworthy
TONI ERDMANN. I pride myself on an appreciation of bizarre cinema, from camp to cult to psychedelic to oddball. It’s not that I’m steely — plenty of genre films leave me unnerved or nonplussed. I cannot claim to understand Mulholland Drive or have particularly liked Holy Motors; nor are the charms of a blockbuster or […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Old You
Reviews DONALD CRIED. For a small group of us who began refining — or at least establishing, as refinement may or may not have anything to do with it — our cinematic palates in the 1990s, this movie will carry with it some familiar modes and tones. Borne of the same non-movement that would eventually […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Motivation
Reviews LIFE. Offered a movie combining a screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, of Deadpool (2016) and Zombieland (2009), and the direction of Daniel Espinosa (Safe House, 2012), one would not necessarily expect that movie to be dark, scary or at times meditative. Nor could one be faulted for being surprised that that movie, […]