There’s a scene in “Not Not Jazz,” a film about the fusion jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood, where the camera prowls around bassist Chris Wood as he slowly saws his upright bass on an upstate New York tennis court dotted with fallen leaves. There are a lot of scenes like that in “Not Not […]
The final words of his 1953 novel “The Unnamable” “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” are among the most famous written by Irish poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist Samuel Beckett. They epitomize both the hopelessness and the senseless resilience of what we’ll call the human spirit in an utterly plain and compelling way. They
Would you like to know the day you will die? It’s a tricky thought exercise. What if you find out you’ll die at a ripe old age? That sure would make retirement investing and travel plans easier. But what if the news was grim? That you’ll die within the year–before you’ve had the chance to
I have spent hundreds of hours in the worlds of Gearbox Software and 2K Games’ “Borderlands,” enraptured by its addictive structure, one that encourages exploration, teamwork, and a constant pursuit of new weapons to unleash on waves of enemies (I’ve written about it here and here, among many other places). While these games are undeniably
The most important things in life happen between the words. Subterranean noise is often louder than dialogue. This is a truth we all experience, but it is challenging to pull off in film, particularly if the subterranean moments are small shifts in consciousness where the character (and audience) understands that nothing will be the same
“What would you say if your daughter told you her boyfriend pushed her down the stairs but it’s okay because really it was just an accident?” Questions like this are at the heart of “It Ends with Us,” based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover. This is a message picture
Your investment in Zack Snyder’s creative vision will likely determine how badly you need to see the R-rated director’s cut of “Rebel Moon,” Snyder’s grim Netflix space opera adventure. This new director’s cut adds 120 minutes of footage, including a numbing wealth of computer-animated gore and a bit more sex. Some of this new material
I didn’t think Doug Liman could deliver a worse film than “Road House,” the plastic, overwrought remake of the 1980s cult classic. With “The Instigators,” his second film of the year, he manages to make Matt Damon, in a re-teaming from their Bourne days, so void of any charm that the director makes this among
This movie opens with views of a manual typewriter, and indignant words being spelled out letter by letter. The time and place of this new movie co-directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, who also wrote the screenplay, becomes clear. It’s the United States in 1918, and the Spanish Flu is making its way to
Once you get over the fact that there won’t be much resembling logical human behavior in “Detained,” the film that follows undeniably provides its own simple pleasures in the Goofy Escapism department. Heavily inspired by “The Usual Suspects,” right down to the inclusion of a mysterious villain who might be in the room with us,
