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Origin stories: The Apprentice and Saturday Night
It’s not only comic book heroes and fairy tale characters who get origin stories. Cultural icons deserve them, too – or at least get them, deserving or not. It is hard to dispute, however, that the American pop culture landscape hasn’t been deeply influenced by two icons closely associated with New York: Donald Trump and Saturday…
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Diva (1982)
When I first saw Diva back in 1982, I was a snot-nosed 16-year-old movie geek eager to overestimate the worth of any foreign-language film that featured a moped, atmospheric lighting and a synthesizer-heavy music score. Diva had all that, and it got to me. I was mesmerized by the overflow of style and look-at-me cool – and it…
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Trap (2024)
If movies won Oscars for their marketing campaigns, M. Night Shyamalan would be sitting pretty. The trailers for his films are invariably intriguing. The writer-director whose works range from the sublime The Sixth Sense to the opposite-of-sublime The Happening has an indisputable gift for high concepts perfect for elevator pitches. And since Shyamalan has been…
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Definitely, Maybe (2008)
It’s never too early to romanticize the past, particularly when it involves affairs of the heart. Amid today’s app-friendly hookups, where a potential relationship is a mere swipe right away, perhaps it is inevitable that a romantic comedy like Definitely, Maybe would turn to the not-so-distant and ostensibly simpler 1990s, back when the Internet was…
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Force Majeure (2014)
Early in Force Majeure, a young, good-looking family – father, mother, son and daughter – is enjoying a leisurely outdoor lunch at a ski resort in the French Alps. The vista, a gleaming and snow-packed mountain, is spectacular. A controlled explosion in the distance triggers an avalanche that commands the attention of the restaurant patrons, including…
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The best movies of 2024 (so far!)
After last year’s bounty of great cinema, Hollywood observers expected an inevitable letdown for 2024. Now that we are a little more than halfway through the year, those prognostications look accurate. The Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year resulted in a significant drop in output. And despite some occasional bright spots (Inside…
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Prince of the City (1981)
Although Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City hit movie theaters in 1981, its deliberate pace, brooding vibe and moral ambivalence place it squarely in line with the director’s string of 1970s-era masterworks that included Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network. Based on a 1978 nonfiction book by Robert Daley, Prince of the City changes names and times, but it essentially…
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The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)
When you have real-life brothers portraying brothers, you’re bound to elicit some interesting dynamics. That’s the case with The Fabulous Baker Boys. A modest box-office success upon its 1989 theatrical release, it chiefly earned raves at the time for a memorable star turn by Michelle Pfeiffer. But the movie holds up, thanks to its richly drawn…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 