HER SMELL (no distrib – TBD):  Writer-director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) is a fan of invective, and the punk rocker Becky Something (Elizabeth Moss), when she’s in the full flower of her moderate success, lets it fly in a way that even Natalie Portman in Vox Lux would find […]

  BLACK MONDAY:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Showtime and Don Cheadle didn’t look far afield for their follow-up after 5 seasons of the network’s House of Lies.  In that series, Cheadle played a fast-talking, rule-breaking business consultant whiz, while in the new BLACK MONDAY… he plays a fast-talking, rule-breaking Wall Street whiz.  (For its part, […]

  It may not be fair, but it’s awfully hard not to compare the second seasons of KILLING EVE directly with HBO’s Barry, since both were comedies-with-drama/dramas-with-comedy about hired killers that aired on virtually the same Sunday nights.  Many of us watched the latest installments of each series in the span of the same few hours.  […]

  Damon Lindelof is fascinated by the elements of storytelling, sometimes to the detriment of the story itself.  It was fitting that a motif of WATCHMEN, both in its Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons 1987 graphic novel version and in Lindelof’s HBO sequel/spin-off, was the construction of watches, because this new version could feel like a fantastically […]

  PASSING:  The actress Rebecca Hall has taken a big swing in her writing/directing debut.  Her film Passing, based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, embraces ambitious, difficult themes with sensitivity and expertise.  The story concerns Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), one-time teen friends who run into each other after several years […]

  892 (no distrib):  John Boyega’s turbo-charged performance fuels this true story.  In 2017, when Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) entered a Wells Fargo branch in a suburb of Atlanta and informed the teller that his backpack contained a bomb, he wasn’t trying to hold up the bank.  Rather, it was his desperate attempt to get enough […]

  HIS THREE DAUGHTERS (no distrib):  The premise of Azazel Jacobs’ film is simple enough to be staged as a play:  as their father Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) lies dying in an unseen room of his Bronx apartment, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) get in each others’ ways as they wait […]

THE AVENGERS:  Worth A Ticket – A Fun Summer Movie, No More Or Less It’s easy to forget that THE AVENGERS is, you know, a movie.  It’s perhaps the ultimate example of corporate intellectual property, bioengineered years in advance of its production by Marvel and that company’s recent owner Disney, like the spawn of particularly […]