Coming in January: cinemasochism redux!

Get me a beer, please.
It’s Sunday morning!
It goes with the spaghetti!
Pariah is in many ways a standard sexual-identity coming-of-age story. Teenager Alike (Adepero Oduye) (and it’s pronounced “ah-LEE-kay”…geddit?) is gay, and outside the …

I get to a point in a film-watching sprint where I begin to wonder if I can recognize a good film any longer. I’ll hit a C-minus/D-plus patch, which is usually only two or three …

“One must be brave if one is to take the wheel.” — Margaret Thatcher, teaching her daughter to drive, and the rest of us how not to write
Imagine the movies that the life of Margaret …

“…Actors.” — everyone
Marilyn Monroe and her myth: spare me. I just really don’t care. I have compassion for her, for what she must have gone through that opened that maw of insecurity and narcissism, but …

Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation of Jane Eyre is gorgeous — and savvy. Fukunaga and adapter Moira Buffini understand what everyone’s come for, which is what everyone’s come for since the nineteenth century: a woman who is …

Steve James documentaries get you inside. By the end of a James film — Hoop Dreams, Stevie, the inexplicably non-shortlisted The Interrupters — you know the subjects like cousins. You care what happens to them, …

Woody Allen stand-ins work best when played by Woody Allen himself. Allen’s voice is so distinctive, and his heroes generally so him despite cosmetic name changes (Alvy Singer, Larry Lipton), that in other hands the …

Suburban-Jersey lawyer Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), who seems to represent seniors exclusively, is floundering. The office needs a new boiler and a new toilet, a dead tree on his front lawn needs removing, he’s got …

Watching Kansas City for the plot is probably not the best way to enjoy the film, for two reasons. The first is that the plot is primarily an excuse to take the audience on an …