A sensory feast as ‘Queen’ 1981 rock concert gets IMAX revisit
A fleeting window into rock’s pantheon opens from January 18th to 21st, as IMAX presents Queen Rock Montreal, a visceral document of the band’s incandescent live energy and artistry. Queen’s deep respect and unwavering generosity toward their audience shines through every frame and every note of this documentary film that captures two nights of performances ...
‘Perfect Days’: Wenders’ cinematic diary of dappled light & shadow
Soon after the pandemic, acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders was invited to witness Tokyo’s award-winning urban renewal project, The Tokyo Toilet, in which renowned designers reimagined the typical urban public restroom. Wenders, who is also a celebrated documentarian (Buena Vista Social Club, Pina, and the new Anselm), was expected to craft short films about each ...
Mini-movie review: Michael Mann’s ‘Ferrari’
If all you want for Christmas is excellent acting and heart-pounding race-car chases in a complex drama-filled love triangle, then master action movie-maker Michael Mann’s Ferrari (presented by NEON) is waiting in a cinema near you. The excellent Adam Driver heads the cast, channeling Enzo Ferrari’s smoldering intensity while working overtime to master the proper ...
FILM REVIEW: ‘Eileen,’ a movie to haunt you on a cold night
One of the rewards of watching Eileen, directed with a pitch-perfect noir sensibility by William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) and presented by Neon, is embracing the unknown. Are we watching a prison break film with an unlikely accomplice? A repressed lesbian love story set in the 1960s? Or is it a violent revenge fantasy fueled by ...
REVIEW: Hanging out with ‘The Holdovers’
“There are certain movies that you hang out with the characters so much that they actually become your friends. Those movies are usually quite long, because it actually takes that long of a time to get past a movie character where you actually feel that you know the person and you like them.” That now-famous ...
Review: Restive political offspring find romance in ‘Red, White & Royal Blue,’ the movie
Anyone who read Casey McQuiston’s best-selling 2019 novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, or who continues to be thoroughly demoralized by all-things-MAGA, will be thrilled to stream this rom-com/ alternate-reality/LGBTQ fantasy-fairy-tale produced by Amazon Studios and directed by Matthew Lopez (the acclaimed playwright of The Inheritance). The story imagines a world in which the son ...
REVIEW: ‘Rise’: dance film earnestly misses its pointe
The French film En Corps, curiously translated as Rise and presented by Blue Fox Entertainment, is a well-made, earnest, and thoroughly innocuous movie. It will interest anyone who watched Natalie Portman in Black Swan and railed to the heavens, “Why didn’t they cast a real dancer in the role!?” This new film will more than ...
How to blow up a pipeline – and blow your mind
What end justifies the means? If the end is radical environmental change and the survival of our planet, can violence be justified? In actions against private property, what if life is lost? How To Blow Up a Pipeline, the new eco-political film from Neon, directed and co-written by Daniel Goldhaber (whose last film was the ...
REVIEW: ‘Champions’ wins at ‘all the feels’
As a feel-good movie, Champions, the winsome new basketball comedy directed by Bobby Farrelly and starring Woody Harrelson, does its job; it consistently dispenses good feelings. Presented by Focus Features with a screenplay by Mark Rizzo, it’s a remake of the celebrated 2018 Spanish film Campeones by Javier Fesser. This American version (I have yet ...
REVIEW: Brandon Cronenberg’s ‘Infinity Pool’ … with a limit
Film directors for screens large and small are taking delight in skewering the 1% for everything they’ve bestowed on the rest of us during our dark and mostly unfunny times. Infinity Pool, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg (Possessor, Antiviral), follows this trend — set by hugely successful comedy-dramas like those by Mark Mylod (The ...