Review: ”Drive My Car”

By the time the title and opening credits of “Drive My Car” drop approximately 45 minutes into its three hour runtime, it already feels like we’ve experienced a complete mini movie. But the embarrassment of riches that director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film, based on the short story by Haruki Murakami, contains are yet to unveil themselves. […]

Review: “Red Rocket”

Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) has just returned to his small Gulf Coast Texas hometown, and before we are actually told anything about him, we can discern a lot just from his face and his surroundings as he sleeps on the bus, the NSYNC pop classic “Bye Bye Bye,” which ends up serving as a sort […]

Review: “Parallel Mothers”

In the maternity ward of a Madrid hospital, two women are about to give birth. Janis Martinez (Penélope Cruz) is an acclaimed photographer approaching 40. She had an affair with Arturo (Israel Elejalde), the archaeologist assisting her with the excavation of a mass grave in her home town, where her great-grandfather and many other residents […]

Review: “A Hero”

Nothing and no one are as they seem in Asghar Farhadi’s “A Hero,” a drama that examines its characters’ ethics with all the tension of a thriller. The writer and director’s latest film, Iran’s entry to this year’s Academy Awards, kicks off with a deceptively simple premise. Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) has been imprisoned for […]

Streaming Movie Reviews

Happy new year! I’m wrapping up some lingering reviews from 2021 releases this week with a batch of mini reviews of films that debuted on streaming services in December, from Adam McKay’s controversial satire “Don’t Look Up” to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s stellar directorial debut “The Lost Daughter” to a pair of intriguing sci-fi films. You can […]

Review: “The Tragedy of Macbeth”

White so bright you can’t stare at it without blinking. Suddenly, figures emerge, walking straight toward the camera as if out of a dream. In fact, this dream-like state pervades the entirety of Joel Coen’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy “Macbeth,” his first solo outing as a director without brother Ethan. But he brings every skill […]

Best Movies of 2021

2021 was a big year for movies. We returned to theaters (at least I did, after a full 14 month absence), and a number of films held over from 2020 finally saw the light of day. That’s not to say that things are back to what we used to know as normal, but as they’ve […]

Review: “Licorice Pizza”

I don’t think I realized just how much I enjoyed “Licorice Pizza” until the final frame of the end credits dissolved, and I remembered that I had spent the last two hours or so sitting in a movie theater in 2021, not running carelessly around the San Fernando Valley in the early 1970s. Writer/director Paul […]

Review: “The Matrix Resurrections”

“The Matrix Resurrections” opens with a moment of déjà vu: familiar music cues accompany rows of green code scrolling across the screen, followed by a phone call, and then a confrontation. If these scenes feel overly familiar, it’s because they are almost an exact recreation of the opening of Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s visionary 1999 […]

Review: “Spider-Man: No Way Home”

I wasn’t sure, especially in light of a pandemic that it seems we’ll never pull out of, if I’d ever have another theatrical experience quite on the level of “Avengers: Endgame.” I’m not a particular fan of that movie, or even the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, but there’s no denying that the conversion […]