Biography

I have been branded a witch, a promiscuous woman, a killer. Maybe it is the characters I perform in the movies that people associate with myself … like a blank space where others project their thoughts and deficiencies, but vengeance is not necessary. I am taking back my spirit. I articulate as a female in […]

This exchange in the middle of Robert Kolodny’s nimble biopic “The Featherweight” brings out the underlying vulnerabilities in this tragic character’s figure to a T. The man of course is the two times featherweight world champion Willie Pep who fought over two hundred and thirty times and won more than his fair share of those […]

“What you think about girls’ boxing?” The man asking that is Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry), the coach of a boys’ boxing club located in Flint, Michigan. It’s 2012, and five years before he’d allowed one girl to join his club (even though it was against protocol): a coiled 11-year-old scowler named Claressa Shields, played […]

Not much more than yet another assembly line typeproduced, Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story appears to be a bit hollow. Most of the time, the most difficult task is determining exactly what the filmmakers meant to achieve, let alone whether it was possible to do so at all. Typically, the last term in quotation marks is […]

There is a particularly good moment towards the end of the sturdy, almost retro epic ‘Cabrini,’ by Brenda Longo and Kathleen Murphy, about an Italian Catholic missionary nun who set up the only orphanage in New York at the dawn of the twentieth century, which coordinated the building of homes and charities century later. In […]

“White Bird” directed by Marc Forster, deals with the Holocaust and comes out as a thoughtful but more or less didactic movie which tries to depict so much tragedy mostly as a classroom interaction for today’s children. It is an extended digression of a French granny narrating to the grandson about tolerance and its meant […]

The 1953 novel ‘The Unnamable’ commences with these words – ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ that most people including his critics would easily attribute to the Irish born poet, playwright, essayist and novelist, Samuel Beckett. dance First is simple and to the point and that is where they are most in terror of […]

Queer: The jazzy experimentalism of the Beat Generation writers has proven to be a complicated task in converting their works to the screen. Walter Salles’ adaptation of On the Road, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl and David Bronenberg’s Naked Lunch attempted the same with varying degrees of success. One of the better films about […]

Christopher Reeve, famous for his role as Superman in the original Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story films, was riding at the Commonwealth Park riding centre in Culpeper, Virginia, on May 27, 1997, when a one meter tall, W-shaped fence was shown to his horse who refused to leap over. Practically every inch he fell resulted […]

There is but a single query that runs through the mind of any follower of Amy Winehouse upon watching director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s ‘Back to Black’, and quite understandably too — What is this f*ckery? In the biopic, Marisa Abela portrays the Camden borough-bred star athlete who was quoted, “I was just one of the girls.” […]