curated cinema: nailing a crooked politician, and making it good TV
2008’s Frost/Nixon is on Prime and Apple TV on both sides of the Atlantic.
Apollo 13
Top Gun: Maverick movie review: we’re well into the danger zone
With its melancholy regret and bittersweet nostalgia, this is far superior to the 1986 blockbuster. But as the sun goes down on American imperialism here, the last-gasp celebration of it unsettles.
First Man movie review: over the moon
Damian Chazelle finds a dreamlike reverie amidst rocket-powered mechanical brawn. As wonderfully, nerve-wrackingly exhausting as it is movingly intimate.
Sully movie review: he’s good people (and so is everyone else)
The ultimate anti-disaster movie. A supremely gripping and powerfully emotional film about, paradoxically, what happens when everything works as it should.
The Martian movie review: life on Mars
An excellent complement to the novel, simplifying the science without dumbing it down yet retaining the suspense and urgency of its interplanetary stranding.
Gravity movie review: nowhere to go but down (London Film Festival)
Stunningly accomplished space survival adventure: heartstopping and heartbreaking; the best film of 2013. Just don’t call it science fiction.
are “movies” automatically synonymous with “Hollywood”?
I know that Hollywood movies dominate around the world, but I got an unexpected reminder of that from a popcorn bucket at an Odeon cinema in London…
The Dilemma (review)
The real dilemma here is not: Should Vince Vaughn tell Kevin James that his — James’s — wife is cheating on him? It’s: How did Ron Howard get attached to this train wreck of a movie?
question of the day: What’s your favorite movie or TV show (or scene from a movie or show) about the moon?
People walked on the moon, 41 years ago today for the first time. Walked on the moon. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s history. Forty-years-gone history. Outside the living memory of many, many people now alive (including me, who wouldn’t make her debut on the planet till a month after Neil Armstrong’s famous first … more…
question of the day: Ron Howard’s Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Tower’? No, seriously: What are these people thinking?
Have you read any of Stephen King’s series The Dark Tower? No? Imagine if Clint Eastwood and James Joyce collaborated on a trippy fantasy about the mystical quest of a gunslinger. It’s weird and fascinating and has inspired a cultish following (and I really need to read more of the series [Amazon U.S.] [Amazon Canada] … more…
