A good friend of mine, who has a disability, often shares with me his opinions of how cinema has looked at the various challenges as something to fix. He speaks about how through ableism, people get categorized as suffering from a disability rather than living with one. Some in the deaf community, for example, consider... Continue Reading →
Ron Howard, for me, has always been a journeyman director. He has navigated through a wide variety of genres, always putting the camera in the right place, getting good performances out of his actors, and producing slick, commercial Hollywood product. He hasn’t accomplished, however, a recognizable voice. Face it, we all can spot a Tarantino,... Continue Reading →
The late great film critic Roger Ebert famously said, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” No other film I’ve seen this year has evoked such empathetic feelings in me than Nomadland. I knew within the first ten minutes of watching Chloé Zhao’s followup to her fantastic feature, The Rider, that I would... Continue Reading →
Most aspiring writers, at one point or another, receive the advice to “write what you know”. Clearly, filmmaker Lawrence Michael Levine has taken that to heart with his tricky, startling, engaging feature, Black Bear. Transposing himself, possibly onto more than one character, Levine has made a film about filmmaking, artistic control, identity, marital fidelity, feminism,... Continue Reading →
Adaptation has been on my mind for most of 2020. As we all have had to isolate from each other and figure out a way to move forward amidst this global pandemic, our ability to adapt has remained a formidable challenge. Although we wear masks, work from home, stay six feet apart, and stream movies... Continue Reading →
Radha has hit a wall. Once a promising “30 Under 30” playwright, she now faces her 40s with nothing but a stalled career, a thankless teaching job, and a crummy Brooklyn apartment to show for it. When opportunity knocks, she opts to…wait for it…pursue rapping instead. Beautifully shot in black and white by the gifted... Continue Reading →
This year’s Inside Out Toronto LGBTQ+ Film Festival opened with Jump, Darling, the feature debut of writer/director Philip J. Connell. On the surface, the tale of a young gay man escaping the big city to live with his grandmother in the countryside, reeks of every fish-out-of-water story ever conceived. The beauty of this film, however... Continue Reading →
Back in June 2019, I reported on a wonderful new musical which premiered at the Hudson Theatre (remember theatre?) in Los Angeles called Shooting Star. With a book by Florian Klein (aka real life porn star Hans Berlin), and music and lyrics by Thomas Zaufke and Eric Ransom respectively, the show took a deep dive... Continue Reading →
Are we forever fated to become our parents or is there a chance to carve out our own identities? This, the central question of Miranda July’s wonderful new film, Kajillionaire, takes an original, engaging route towards such a discovery. July, best known for her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, in which... Continue Reading →
As a Jew, I had grown tired of Holocaust narratives in film. Can anyone make anything better or more definitive than Schindler’s List? I’d always been dubious until Son Of Saul proved me wrong. So, with a more open mind, I approached Antebellum, the debut feature by directing partners (and partners in life) Gerard Bush... Continue Reading →
