Among the many qualities I might attribute to writer/director/producer Jordan Peele — expert auteur, biting satirist, modern horror maven — the only one that really gives me pause is “crowd-pleaser…
Director Chloe Okuno’s debut film, Watcher, is not an overtly feminist take on
the voyeur/stalker sub-category of the thriller genre. Working with a screenplay
by Zack Ford, Okuno’s movie functions…
One of my favorite films of this past year was Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, an endearing vision of young, star-crossed love that is so sentimental, stylized and saturated in uber-no…
Short films, like short stories, are an exercise in economy and punch. They are measured in minutes, not hours, stripping away all the excelsior and subplots of longer forms to achieve a singular i…
By Rick Levin A dear friend of mine tells this story about his self-awakening:
It was a Saturday night in Euclid, Ohio, sometime in the mid ’70s. He was six or
seven at the time, and his family was…
By Rick Levin A dear friend of mine tells this story about his self-awakening: It was a Saturday night in Euclid, Ohio, sometime in the mid ’70s. He was six or seven at the time, and his family was…
I had no idea I’d been waiting my entire adult life for the absurd and
exhilarating spectacle of Sean Penn and Tom Waits chewing up the scenery
together in a smokey L.A. bar named Tail o’ the Cock,…
A sense of humor is either the last thing to go or the first, but either way the death of humor is an epidemic these days, as well as a mortal loss, more speaking to the wretchedness of our hearts …
In retrospect, it strikes me as odd that I’ve never seen the 1950 film version of Harvey, Mary Chase’s Pulitzer-winning play about a pleasantly eccentric gentleman named Elwood P. Dowd and his boon…
Two couples, one reeling from the horrific murder of their only daughter, the other coping with a terminal illness that is reaching its late stage, come together and confront their demons: This is …