Son of Saul review — Hell Just Outside The Frame

Directed by László Nemes | Written by Nemes and Clara Royer | 107 min | ▲▲▲▲△ The Sonderkommando were the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps chosen to help administrate the dealing of death—organizing victims for the ovens, rifling through their belongings for valuables, disposing of the bodies—all to delay their own extermination by a few short…Read More

Welcome to the Winter Doldrums

The stretch of time from October through the holidays is just long enough to fool a regular movie-goer that this is the way movies are all the time. Then January arrives, and Hollywood takes a big dump on us. How else do you explain the wildly miserable reviews for Norm Of The North and The Forest ? At…Read More

Remembering Alan Rickman and David Bowie

It's been a rough week, absorbing the news that actor, writer, and director Alan Rickman, and creative icon David Bowie, have died. Both were 69. A Shakespearean thesp in the UK, most audiences in North America were introduced to Alan Rickman with the one-two punch of Die Hard (1988) and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). He's remarkable…Read More

Youth review — The Artist as an Old Man

Written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino | 124 min | ▲▲▲△△  Sorrentino's last film, the sumptuous Italian drama The Great Beauty, was something to see (it had everything from orgies to a giraffe) but a little hard to care about. It featured Toni Servillo as a 65-year-old writer unable to come to terms with the…Read More