Three spoofs for the price of one. Gangsters, the living dead, and the almost dead — played by a cluster of well-respected British character actors (Alan Ford, Honor 'Pussy Galore' Blackman, Dudley Sutton, Georgina Hale) drafted to occupy yet another nursing home filled with feisty oldsters — interface in this …
What Tom Cruise did for military recruitment in Top Gun, he tries to do again for bartending school. Enroll now, for a unique opportunity to travel, to meet people (young women, rich women), and to learn the arts of synchronized drink-mixing, bottle-juggling, and dimple-flashing. Philosophy is no longer a curriculum …
Pixar has dealt in the themes of memory and/or family for so long that it’s a wonder it took them this long to hit upon The Day of the Dead as a setting. A whole holiday dedicated to honoring and remembering your ancestors, complete with the visual splendor of ofrendas …
Chanel and Stravinsky. (The names arranged on screen in such a configuration as to give the impression the title might be Chanel Coco and Igor Stravinsky.) The Parisian fashionista, that is to say, who offered a haven to the expatriate Russian family-man composer, and eventually offered herself to him as …
Well-dressed tedium. Writer and director Anne Fontaine presumes your interest on the grounds that the dark-eyed orphaned heroine will go on to renown as Coco Chanel. With Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola, and Emmanuelle Devos.
Science fiction, but only by the technicality of containing several characters who are said to be aliens. They could as easily have been somebody's fairy godparents or genies from a bottle or the sort of lubricious Cupids who used to get things going in Thorne Smith's fantasy novels of the …
Cocoon: The Regurgitation. Cocoon: The Old Folks Acting Like Kids Again. Cocoon: The Transgalactic and Nontactile Romance. (Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!) Cocoon: The Endangered Alien Species. Cocoon: The Suspenseless Suspense. Cocoon: The Major Life-Altering Snap Decisions. (So what was life like on Antarea anyway?) The director, Daniel Petrie, …
Where do they get off calling it an “Apple Original” when part of CODA’s (as in: Children of Deaf Adults) premise (and a good handful of its scenes) are lifted from the French/Belgian film from 2014, The Bélier Family? Normally, I’d concede the rationale behind American-language remakes of foreign films …
Ungadgety specimen of science fiction, set in a not too distant future, with primary locations in the Far East and the Middle East, when a global Big Brother keeps a close and censorious eye on human coupling and breeding. While neither very original nor skillful as storytelling, the vision of …
Brief, humane, and (literally) visceral documentary about the ER at LA County Hospital. (The title refers to those increasingly frequent times when the combination of patient load and acute emergencies demand maximum effort and attention from the doctors on duty.) Director Ryan McGarry opens with a flurry of life-or-death activity, …
Can algorithms discriminate based on personal prejudices embedded into the technology? Are computers capable of racism and sexism? In her quest to create an inspiration mirror for her science project, M.I.T student Joy Buolamwini discovered her computer software program worked only when she donned a white mask. The training sets …
Code Name: Tiranga is a story of a spy on an unfaltering and fearless mission for her nation in a race against time where sacrifice is her only choice. Starring: Parineeti Chopra, Harrdy Sandhu, Sharad Kelkar, Rajit Kapur, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Shishir Sharma, Sabyasachi Chakraborty, and Deesh Mariwala.