Search for 2017

In 2013, after making Side Effects, Stephen Soderbergh announced his retirement from feature filmmaking. Over the next few years, he kept busy, primarily as the main creative force behind the TV series The Knick, which he directed, executive p...

Over the years, movies have given us countless meditations on death and mourning, many of them hopelessly artificial and cloying. When something like Love after Love comes along with its unsparing look at this process, the result can be uncomf...

Ah, the dinner party – that wonderful stand-by for so many European films. Over the course of my fifty-plus years on this planet, I have been to my fair share of these (usually tedious) soirees, and none have been anything like the ones pres...

The Man Who Invented Christmas conflates the biography of Charles Dickens (at least until 1843) with the events of one of his seminal works, A Christmas Carol. Watching the film leads one to the conclusion that, although the story might have w...

For more than 30 years, one of the great mysteries of journalism and politics was the identity of Woodward & Bernstein’s key Watergate source, “Deep Throat.” Between Deep Throat’s period of contribution (1972-73) and his voluntary unma...

The filmmakers behind Marshall understand what it takes to make a successful bio-pic. Instead of using a “greatest hits” strategy that attempts to cram an entire life into two hours, they have targeted a single representative event from th...

Mayhem, a bloody exploitation satire, is a little like The Purge in an office building. Although designed in part as a skewering of intra-office politics and the unpleasantness of climbing the corporate ladder, the movie quickly devolves into ...

Based on the real-life story of writer/director Angie Wang, MDMA takes viewers back to the mid-1980s (1985 and 1986, specifically) and immerses them in the life and experiences of an 18-year old Jersey girl struggling to find her way in a prest...

After the misstep of Mistress America, The Meyerowitz Stories (full name: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)) represents a “return to form” for writer/director Noah Baumbach. Less pretentious and self-indulgent than some of his mumb...

Midnighters takes a common situation – one fueled by too much alcohol and too little attentiveness while driving – and uses it as the jumping-off point for a series of events that puts a working class couple’s life into a tailspin. With ...