Peneflix MOVIE REVIEWS BY PENEFLIX

Watching this stunningly sensational film, directed by Robert Zemeckis (“Forest Gump”) and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as funambulist, Philippe Petit, who on August 6th, 1974 floated between the rooftops of New York City’s World Trade Center aka the “Twin Towers”, I was overwhelmed by a powerful, wrenching sense of nostalgia, not just for the loss of lives and the erasure of ... Read More »

What a difference seven days creates; last week’s pathetic “Piku” is beautifully overshadowed by director Anurag Kashyap’s slick, luminous “Bombay Velvet”, set in 1969; Bombay is experiencing a burgeoning building tsunami; gritty graft, gangsters galore, sepia-toned cinematography; a homage to Hollywood gangster flicks of the 30’s and 40’s and actor James Cagney; the film commences with Cagney’s death scene in ... Read More »

Director Joanna Rudnick’s remarkable iconoclastic commentary on traditional, expected norms of beauty: thin, waif-like, gauntly-chiseled countenances, leggy models who grace the covers of fashion magazines are replaced, shattered by the inimitable photographer Rick Guidotti who sees beyond the facade and unearths, brings forth the gorgeousness of those with physical aberrations; “disfigured” by Albinism, hypo –pigmentation, Sturge-Weber syndrome and chromosome 18 ... Read More »

This outstanding, beautifully acted and directed film based on the true trek Robyn Davidson (b.1950) accomplished in 1977; 1,700 miles, nine months, through the treacherous, torturous, glorious landscape of Australia’s western desert to the Indian Ocean; Ms. Davidson wrote about her excursion in a 1980 memoir; Mia Wasikowska is remarkable as the recalcitrant, intrepid, fearless young woman whose intransigence led ... Read More »

“More inhumanity has been done (to man) by man himself, than any other of nature’s causes.” (Samuel von Pufendore, 1632-94). Experiencing, (it is a visceral, torturous, emotional rack) Steve McQueen’s exceptionally intelligent “12 Years a Slave”, the true story of Solomon Northup’s horrific betrayal; he is a refined, educated violinist, with a wife and two children, living respectfully in Saratoga ... Read More »

Marion Cotillard, with a face to launch a thousand films, could not salvage “The Immigrant” a movie with a big heart, and inconsequential spine; Ellis Island, 1921; “Ewa” (Cotillard) a Polish immigrant, separated from her sister is protected by “Bruno” (Joaquin Phoenix) a volatile “savior” who uses Ewa for nefarious, illegal purposes. The film flounders, drowns in melodrama, benign character ... Read More »

After 20 films, all comprising a bovine blob, sloshing simultaneously in my beleaguered brain, recognizing a need for a stimulus-free void to synthesize, analyze, masticate and separate the mediocre from the sublime; arriving home to the Academy Award nominations, exhausted, exhilarated, energized by the electric, enticing, exciting, imaginative world of cinema, knowing its ubiquity will never cease to overwhelm and ... Read More »

HAPPIEST OF NEW YEAR’S TO ALL MY DEVOTED SUBSCRIBERS. YOUR COMMENTS, INSIGHTS NEVER CEASE TO BRING ME JOY, WISDOM AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING MINUTES. FILM CONSTANTLY BROADENS HORIZONS, WARMS THE HEART, CHALLENGES CONCEPTIONS, KEEPING THE ARTERIES OPEN AND THE MIND ELASTIC. THANK YOU! BE ON THE ALERT FOR MINI REVIEWS OF WHAT TO AVOID OR SEEK OUT IN THE MAGICAL REALM OF ... Read More »

There are times when the comfort of predictability, a cocoon of complacency is the perfect anecdote in a season of massive doses of mayhem, morbidity, dismemberment and destruction. “Promised Land” is the fare, pabulum, alleviating the the gloom of “Les Miz,” “Django Unchained”; a dose of “fracking” (a combination of water, sand and chemicals, hydraulically drilled into the ground to ... Read More »

Unmitigated, gruesome violence, guts and gore resonate throughout Quentin Tarantino’s 1858 saga of an unshackled slave “Django” (incredible, brilliant performance by Jamie Foxx) and his associate Dr.King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, genius informs his every role) as they roll through bigoted, slavery -infested South; bounty hunters; ignoring the “alive” and focusing on the “dead” portion of the “wanted” poster. The deftness, ... Read More »