Farce, to me, occupies a place between the Shakespearean comedies of people falling in love and the modern romcom. False Confessions is a twenty-first century update of an eighteenth century French farce. If it seems stagy it is because of more than just its...
Life is a series of transitions, bookended by the two great transitions of birth and death. But along the way there are many more shifts in our lives?some trivial, others more profound. The Midwife is a story of the transitions of life that are--like life itself--a...
?I don?t belong here. They don?t belong here. You don?t belong here.? The Zookeeper?s Wife opens in an almost Edenic world. Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) and Antonina (Jessica Chastain) Zabinski live on the grounds of the Warsaw Zoo, where Jan is the head zookeeper. Their...
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ?Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.? That pretty well sums up the thesis of Beatriz at Dinner. I?ve read some reviewers who call this the first film to deal with the Trump era. There are certainly...
It?s not unusual for me to go to a Disney/Pixar animation film and be more impressed with the short that plays before the feature than the feature itself. That is certainly true of Lou, which plays before Cars 3. I thought Cars 3 was very well done with important...
Fans of mild slapstick will be attracted to Lost in Paris. It is the work of Belgian comedy team of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon. They bring a burlesque visual sensibility to their work. The film is made up of three conjoined stories. When Canadian librarian Fiona...
In the worldwide banking crisis of 2008, many big banks (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo among them) were committing fraud in the mortgage market. They paid fines, but they also got massive taxpayer-funded bailouts because they were ?too big to...
?They?re not even dogs anymore; they?re warriors. And they come back with all the same issues we do.? Based on a true story, Megan Leavey is a story of warriors?a Marine and her dog. But it is more than a war story. It is the story of a struggle to find one?s place in...
Two lives are torn apart by a catastrophic event. When two airliners collide in midair killing everyone on both planes, Roman Melnyk (Arnold Schwarzenegger) loses his wife and daughter. For air-traffic controller Jacob Bonanos (Scoot McNairy) who was on duty when the...