Search for Hole

When one considers movies and pies, the first title likely to come to mind is American Pie, one of the defining comedies of the 1990s. Although Joshua Lester’s 2021 feature debut isn’t going to change that, the indie rom-com offers a different...

The first two Disneynature documentaries, 2007's Earth and 2009's Oceans, were visual feasts - amazing experiences made all the more remarkable when blown up for big screen viewing (they were distillations of TV miniseries). Since then, the label h...

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the cinematic YA flame burned hot and bright but, like many such fires, it quickly exhausted its fuel and was snuffed out by fatigued and uninterested audiences. Although YA novels continue to generate health...

Never has chess been a more apt metaphor for life than in Boaz Yakin's feature debut, Fresh. Like Lawrence Fishburne in Searching for Bobby Fischer, Samuel L. Jackson sits in New York's Washington Square playing speed chess and dispensing valu...

Of all the films I have seen in my life, A Hole in My Heart may have been the most disappointing. This is the fourth film from hot Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. Two of his previous three movies, Show Me Love and Lilya 4-Ever, made my year-end...

The novel Love in the Time of Cholera is a meditation on love in its many forms. It is a serious work from Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The movie Love in the Time of Cholera is a misstep of nearly epic proportions. As adapt...

(Spoilers, as one might expect from a retrospective of a 50-year old movie.)Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated film to win a Best Picture Oscar, is less shocking than its reputation might indicate. Essentially a two-character buddy film, the ma...

A Price Above Rubies is writer/director Boaz Yakin's follow-up to his highly-regarded, tautly-paced 1994 picture, Fresh. Sadly, little of the energy and intelligence of the earlier film is evident in this, an overwrought melodrama populated ...

Numerous movies about grief miss the mark by a wide margin, sliding down a slippery slope of schlocky melodrama with overacting performers failing to convince us that their tears are real. Every once in a while, however, a film gets it right. In ...