Search for 2017

The Midwife has two things going for it: Catherine Frot and Catherine Deneuve. There’s no disputing the quality of acting in this film, at least insofar as the leads are concerned. Unfortunately, almost everything else in Martin Provost’s ...

A slickly-made exploitation film set during the War of 1812, Ted Geoghegan’s Mohawk is taut, bloody, and uncompromising – all with a dollop of social commentary thrown in for good measure. Like the recently released Hostiles (which is set ...

When it comes to using dialogue as a mechanism to drive a movie, few (not named David Mamet) are better than Aaron Sorkin with his rat-a-tat-tat approach and ability to craft monologues as living things. After having had a hand in writing some...

Kudos to Darren Aronofsky for having the courage to make this film. Kudos to Paramount Pictures for having the guts to open this wide rather than burying it or hiding it as a VOD release. It’s too bad it doesn’t work.With mother!, Aronofs...

It’s hard to imagine a more generic wilderness adventure-turned-romance than Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us. Saved from the cinematic purgatory of direct-to-video by the screen presence of Idris Elba and Kate Winslet and some spe...

At the heart of Mudbound, director Dee Rees’ adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s novel, is the relationship that forms (and the consequences of that relationship) between two World War 2 veterans – one white and one black – in the deeply se...

When Universal Pictures remade The Mummy in 1999, they wisely opted for a radically different tone, shifting from the atmospheric horror of the 1932 original to a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style adventure motif. Now, for the third major film to b...

Like most Agatha Christie stories, Murder on the Orient Express is all about the “whodunnit?” Once that question has been answered, there’s little reason to revisit the story. Christie never cared much about character development and her ...

The enduring popularity of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1951 novel, My Cousin Rachel, relates to the ambiguity surrounding the title character. In his solid 2017 adaptation of the book, screenwriter/director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) has captured the...

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Novitiate is the even-handedness with which it treats religion in general and 1960s era Catholicism in particular. Set mostly within the confines of a convent, the feature debut of writer/director Margare...