Search for 2020

To this day, there remains uncertainty as to the value of the intelligence information provided by Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Was he, as the official narrative asserts, the highest-ranking Sov...

Animated films come in three flavors: childish cartoons that are designed primarily to appeal to the under-10 crowd, middle-of-the-road efforts that at least make an attempt to entertain parents while never threatening established envelopes, and ...

When it comes to a Spike Lee movie, it would be foolish to expect a politics-free zone. Lee is an activist filmmaker and has never pretended otherwise. He makes movies that entertain and educate but, most importantly, he seeks to challenge. So...

I love the beginning – the sense of time and place. Part of this has to do with the introductory voiceover narration (provided by the writer of the novel, Donald Ray Pollock, whose intonation has all the right qualities for this job). Part o...

The Dig is the kind of low-key period piece that the Brits do so well. Based on actual events that occurred in pre-WW2 Suffolk, the movie explores the efforts of excavator Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to uncover a sixth-century burial site. Of ...

On July 2, 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain paperwork necessary for his planned marriage…and never emerged. His disappearance quickly became a major news story and, as details c...

William Shakespeare. Charles Dickens. Jane Austen. Those three authors are perhaps the most frequently adapted writers of classic novels in the relatively short history of cinema. There’s a reason for that. The timeless nature of their outpu...

If I was looking for a single word to describe Enola Holmes, I’d probably settle on “charming.” That’s not because it features the best example of period-piece romance (although it shows signs of appealing to the rom-com crowd) or that...

It has been nearly 15 years since the last time Will Ferrell was funny (Stranger than Fiction) and about a decade since the last time he has starred in anything worth watching (his surprisingly effective dramatic turn in 2010’s Everything Mu...

If you’re looking for a strong narrative to go along with kick-ass action, you’re not going to find it in Extraction, a direct-to-Netflix thriller that offers plenty of the latter but not a lot of the former. The movie provides little more...