If you’re the kind of person who still pays close attention to what the traditional broadcast networks are doing, you may have noticed that this has been the most uninspiring season for the Big Four in a very long time. Even with the very recent success ofThis Is Us on …
Read More »'They Shall Not Grow Old': Peter Jackson's WWI Doc Is a Cinema Event
A World War I documentary in 3D with colorized archival footage that looks as new as the day it was shot. What sounds like an impossible feat becomes a riveting reality in the hands of director Peter Jackson and his New Zealand Weta crew of restoration miracle workers, led by …
Read More »'Bird Box' Review: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
Remember A Quiet Place, which created a post-apocalyptic world in which aliens would pop out and kill you if you made a single sound? Bird Box is pretty much the same story, except it’s looking at the creatures from another planet that will end your days on earth. Lay your …
Read More »'Happy as Lazzaro' Review: Holy Fools and Fairy Tales, Italian Style
The men and women, boys and girls crowd into the kitchen of a small house, laughing and teasing and drinking. One of the young workers who plow the fields of a tobacco farm, on the Lazio region estate where these rural laborers live, has just serenaded his true love; the …
Read More »'A Star Is Born' Review: Cooper, Lady Gaga Hit All the Right Notes
One star soars; the other crashes and burns. It’s a tale as old as time, flattened and fatigued by constant repetition. So why in hell did Bradley Cooper choose to make his debut as director with the third remake of A Star Is Born? What could he bring to the …
Read More »'Murphy Brown' Review: A Crusty Comeback
Moments before the start of Murphy Brown’s return to the world of TV news — which comes late in Murphy Brown‘s return to the world of TV sitcoms (it premieres September 27th on CBS) — Candice Bergen’s eponymous heroine has a rare moment of self-doubt. “What if nobody watches?” she …
Read More »Travers: 'Sicario: Day of the Soldado' Is Ultraviolent, Immoral Sequel
For starters, the follow-up to 2016’s Sicario is not in the same essential-viewing category as the original – that’s what happens when you remove inspired director Denis Villeneuve from the equation. Ditto actress Emily Blunt who humanized the original’s covert drug action as a conflicted FBI field agent and is …
Read More »Travers on 'Tyler Perry's Acrimony' Review: It Will Make You Angry
For all Taraji P. Henson fans out there – and I’m a card-carrying, dues-paid-up member of the club – the bad news is that her latest feature, following on the heels of this year’s hitwoman horror show Proud Mary, sucks this glorious actress down into more cinematic quicksand. Tyler Perry‘s …
Read More »'A Wrinkle in Time' Is One Magnificently Weird, Messy Blockbuster
“It was a dark and stormy night.” That’s the first sentence of Madeline L’Engle’s 1962 fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time, a smoke-screen opening salvo that doesn’t begin to prep readers for what lies ahead in this beloved kids’ book: tesseracts and shape-shifting biddies, shadowy forces and M.I.A. fathers, interdimensional …
Read More »'Hostiles': Western Puts Christian Bale in Path of Violence, Grace
The continuously astounding Christian Bale is one of our best film actors, and he’s at his peak in Hostiles, a powderkeg of a western, written and directed in a soulful fever by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass). Working from an unpublished manuscript by the late …
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