A life-sized cardboard cut-out of John Wayne looms over the interior of an organized militia compound. One of the founders promises new recruits that the Second American Revolution is inevitable. When the United Nations arrive, he warns there won’t even…
Movie Review: ‘Hard Sell’ makes the mistake on focusing on the least interesting character as the protagonist
To his credit, Sean Nalaboff’s Hard Sell has something very interesting to say, but probably not what he had in mind. It’s one of the most pro-sex worker films I’ve ever seen. Katrina Bowden plays Bo, an ex-stripper who gets pulled…
Movie Review: ‘Welcome to Happiness’
A man sits alone near a fireplace and puts a gun in his mouth. Somewhere else a beautiful red-headed woman gets ready to eat dinner with an eccentric rich man, with an appetite for strange purchases. Still elsewhere an old…
TV Review – War and Peace (2016) | A great melodrama, a mediocre adapation
This past Christmas, I received an opulent Folio Society edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace from my father. I spent the next month setting out on what fans of the novel refer to as “The Long March.” Even at…
Movie Review: ‘Tabloid Vivant’ is the strangest and best film you won’t understand you’ll see all year
The hell is this film? An erotic thriller? A psychological horror film? A didactic tract on art history and the evolution of aesthetics? For the entirety of Kyle Broom’s Tabloid Vivant I struggled to keep up with a film unconcerned…
Movie Review: ‘Dheepan’ disappoints, doesn’t deserve the Palme
Well, the Powers That Be certainly took their sweet time releasing Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan. You’d think being the recipient of the 2015 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival would have been enough to fast-track any film into wide release.…
Movie Review: ‘The Best of It’
Seventeen miles north of the Las Vegas Strip, the man sits alone in the house built from his winnings and pounds away at his computer. He’s never been married, has few friends and has only an old dog for companionship. At…
