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THE MURDERER LIVES AT NUMBER 21 (FRENCH: ENGLISH SUBTITLES)

Director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) the eminent emperor of French film noir (his American counterpart, Alfred Hitchcock) is rising from the morgue, via digitally enhanced classics; “The Murderer Lives at Number 21”, made in 1942, during German occupation of Paris; black and white, as in the archival photographic process, cements viewers concentration on the characters; scintillatingly diverse, wickedly witty, Clouzot’s prodigious ... Read More »

SUNDAY’S ILLNESS, NETFLIX (SPANISH/FRENCH: ENGLISH SUBTITLES)

Director/writer Ramon Salazar’s “Sunday’s Illness” is as good as any film playing in today’s theaters; opening earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival, Netflix’s prescience is a boon to those who crave watching excellence in one’s living room. Unlike any mother/daughter relationship you’ve experienced, nuances subtly revealed, profound performances, make this film a thrilling, psychologically titillating scenario. “Anabel” (Susi ... Read More »

MARY SHELLEY (ON DEMAND & IN THEATRES)

Springing from Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’s (1797-1851) fecund imagination is one of literature’s finest, bleakest, most sorrowful creatures, “Frankenstein”; written by Mary, while still eighteen years old, living with free-spirited, romantic British poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglass Booth), at the request of Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), a rival poet; culling from her own experience, a desire to rearrange fate. Director Haifaa ... Read More »

ON CHESIL BEACH

British author Ian McEwan’s masterful works are infused with immaculate, poetic prose; his gift of capturing the human condition reigns in league with Dickens, Thackeray, Proust and the recently departed Philip Roth; a single reading is not sufficient in satisfying one’s lust for his written, exquisite prosaic conquests.  Unfortunately, so much of his beautiful verbiage, is lost in the film’s ... Read More »

BEAST

“Because inside me is a beast that snarls, and growls and strains toward freedom…. and as hard as I try, I cannot kill it.” (Veronica Roth) “Beast” is a deliciously twisted, slightly diabolical film, that tantalizes and terrorizes simultaneously; the barren, unfriendly landscape of Jersey is home to troubled “Moll” (steaming, seething performance by Jessie Buckley), twenty-seven, living at home ... Read More »

LET THE SUNSHINE IN (0N DEMAND & IN THEATRES (FRENCH: ENGLISH SUBTITLES)

Juliette Bincohe’s giftedness as an actor is squandered in this trite, supposed romantic journey; director Claire Denis (“White Material”) focus on “Isabelle’s” (Binoche), a talented artist, quest for “Mr. Goodbar”, lacks electricity, intelligence, titillation; Isabelle is divorced with a ten-year-old daughter, looking for love in “all the wrong places”; bed-bouncing from one meaningless relationship to another, losing bits and pieces ... Read More »

FOXTROT (HEBREW: ENGLISH SUBTITLES)

Emotionally flayed from the onset when “Michael and Dafna Feldmann” are informed of their son “Jonathan’s” (Yonaton Shiray) death.  For fifteen minutes viewers are exposed to raw, pulverizing pain; with bleeding souls, and splintered hearts, Lior Ashkenazi (“Footnote”) and Sarah Adler (“The Cakemaker”) hypnotically generate the unspoken magnitude of the insurmountable. Writer/director Samuel Maoz’s complex scenario uses the fluid structure ... Read More »

A WRINKLE IN TIME

Cursed with a hollow, vapid, platitudinous script, bludgeoning narrative “A Wrinkle in Time” is a lackluster, uninspiring attempt at a geometric, morality play. Director Ava DuVernay’s exceedingly ambitious rendition of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 book focuses on “Meg Murry’s” (Storm Reid), her brother, “Charles Wallace Murry” (Deric McCabe), and friend “Calvin O’Keefe” (Levi Miller) quest for her father, scientist “Dr.Alex Murry” ... Read More »

OPERATION RED SEA (CHINESE: ENGLISH SUBTITLES)

Emotionally pulverizing, exhilarating, astounding, director Dante Lam blazingly enters the realm of  “Greatest Battle Movies” ever to daunt the screen, joining the ranks of “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, “Apocalypse Now”, “Black Hawk Down”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “The Hurt Locker”, “American Sniper”; the dazzling intensity of “Operation Red Sea” kept an oversold audience in stunned silence for a two ... Read More »

THE PARTY

It took seconds for exsanguination to squelch Sally Potter’s desperately ambitious, shrilly delivered parody on politics, infidelity and scathing commentary on British intelligentsia; it took seventy-one minutes for the protagonists to sink to the lowest common denominator: “Janet” (Kristin Scott Thomas) is celebrating her “crowning” as  Health Minister; “Bill” (Timothy Spall) her bibulous, blubbering husband; “April” (outstanding Patricia Clarkson) a ... Read More »

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