It may have echoes of some of those all-star disaster movies so popular in the ’70s like The Towering Inferno, but don’t kid yourself, this one really happened. The new film Hotel Mumbai recounts the events of November 2008 in Mumbai, the vibrant center of India’s entertainment and financial world, where a group of…
In 2010, Jesse Eisenberg got an Oscar nomination as Mark Zuckerberg, the genius behind Facebook. Now he is back in the innovation business, this time as a fast-talking young (fictional) entrepreneur with dreams of creating a fiber-optic line from Kansas to New Jersey and upending the tech world. Like Facebook the idea…
For me, one of the joys of last September’s Toronto Film Festival was watching Isabelle Huppert go for broke playing a disturbed lonely woman in the suspense thriller Greta. It falls into a genre we don’t see as much anymore, at least on this scale, echoing movies like Fatal Attraction, Misery, The Hand That Rocks the…
Leave it to The Rock to see the cinematic possibilities in the true story of the rise of WWE superstar wrestler Saraya Knight, better known to her fans as Paige. A former WWE star himself, Dwayne Johnson was sitting in a London hotel suite one night when he came upon a documentary about a British family of wrestlers…
In 2000, Mel Gibson had one of his biggest commercial hits in the comedy What Women Want, in which a whack on the head suddenly allows him to hear women’s thoughts. The upside of that was the discovery that women were exceptionally smarter and better than men. Big shock, eh? Nancy Meyers directed that one. Now Adam…
In 2014, Nightcrawler was among my top five films of that year, a wickedly funny and dark take on the local news ratings game and the bottom feeders who help sensationalize it. Dan Gilroy wrote and directed it brilliantly, and it starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo in career-best performances. Now the three of them…
After the brilliantly funny and caustic Attack the Block, which pitted invading aliens against a gang of British teens, it has taken eight years for director Joe Cornish to follow it up with a second film. Unfortunately, The Kid Who Would Be King is more influenced by the success of the Harry Potter films than…
Few contemporary filmmakers have come out swinging as impressively as M. Night Shyamalan did when he was heralded as the “new Spielberg” after a series of successes near the start of this century, including most notably his Oscar-nominated The Sixth Sense, Signs and Unbreakable, the latter being the 2000 film with…
I am a sucker for dog movies. From Old Yeller to my favorite My Dog Skip, and from Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey to Benji, I just can’t get enough of them. Emotionally I am a wreck after seeing a good one.
That was also the case with 2017’s A Dog’s Purpose, which was the first in a planned series of canine…
Awards season has truly kicked off and Sundance is just around the snowy corner, but on the small screen midseason debuts are popping up almost every night. It’s plenty reason to weigh in on what show you just can't miss this week.
Like a grand messy table, it's a pretty rich selection, with Netflix's Asa Butterfield…
It's the end of another year, and I must say a pretty good one for movies of all stripes. So it is time for my Top 10 Movies of 2018 to be unveiled, as usual over two different days and in two parts. Today it is Part 1 covering numbers 10 up to 6 on my list. I have to say I am not a big fan of separating these artists…
There can be no question that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a full-fledged cultural icon , seemingly always in the news particularly recently with health bouts in which she appears to be the indomitable survivor no matter what is thrown at her. Earlier this year a documentary from Participant Media , RBG , became…
