Liberace was a one-off. He was piano prodigy who grew up to be one of the highest paid entertainers in the world. He was reviled by the critics for his musical choices and his allegedly sloppy playing. He was beloved by his mostly female audience for his glamour and sense of showmanship. He was regarded by many as a joke, a purveyor of easy-listening mush, the Andre Rieu of his era. If Liberace is...
Two teenage boys encounter a fugitive and form a pact to help him evade the bounty hunters on his trail and to reunite him with his true love. MUD focuses on the life of 14 year old Ellis (Sheridan) who lives on a houseboat with his parents. His father Senior (Ray McKinnon) fishes the river and Ellis helps to sell the catch to the people of the small town nearby. Ellis’s best friend is also 14, a ...
THE HANGOVER (2009) was a world-wide phenom’ wherein director Todd Phillips took the crudity and fratboy energy of his films OLD SCHOOL and ROAD TRIP genetically modified the ingredients in a Thermomix, sprinkled pixie dust on the concoction and produced a new movie with box office approaching $500 million. People loved THE HANGOVER. Film hipsters who hate everything thought it was funny. Your unc...
In New York City, Victor (Farrell) a crime lord’s right-hand man, is seduced by Beatrice (Rapace), a woman seeking retribution. Victor and Beatrice live in crummy high-rise apartments. She can see into his place and he can see into hers. Victor sees Beatrice watching him. He is a cautious man and is disturbed by this strange intense woman. The criminal gang he is part of is under scrutiny an...
The story of an eleven-year-old diabetic girl nicknamed Skunk (Eloise Laurence). She lives with her father Archie (Tim Roth), her elder brother Jed (Bill Milner), and au pair Kasia (Zana Marjanovic) in North London. Her life changes after witnessing a violent attack on a neighbour in the cul-de-sac where she lives. BROKEN is a first feature from director Rufus Norris. It is written by Mark O’Rowe ...
French writer-director Lorraine Levy’s new feature THE OTHER SON (Le fils de L’autre) is a melodrama that seeks to investigate the human stories that lie beneath the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The premise is old indeed. Babies are accidentally switched at birth and each grows up living the life intended for the other. The consequences of this mix-up are particularly devastating given the...
A former Weather Underground activist goes on the run from a journalist who has discovered his identity. Robert Redford plays the former activist Nick Sloan, now a civil rights lawyer called Jim Grant living in upstate New York. He has been hidden in plain sight for thirty years. When a former activist colleague, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), who has also been in hiding, is arrested by the FBI, ...
Nicholas Hoult is R, a young man facing the existential crisis that comes with being a zombie. Grunting his way through a post-apocalyptic America with the mindless hunger of the undead, R has no memories, but he has dreams and his inner life is full of wonder and longing for the time that must have gone before. WARM BODIES is an obvious creative conceit for a genre over-stuffed with variations. I...
Mild-mannered businessman Sandy Patterson (Bateman) travels from Denver to Miami to confront the deceptively harmless-looking woman Diana (McCarthy) who has been living it up after stealing Sandy’s identity. Seth Gordon’s IDENTITY THIEF is a comedy with a very familiar feel. In this post-Hangover, post-Apatow movie world that we live in, we the audience, expect a certain level of bad behavio...
Portraying history is difficult. Documentarians are often accused of misrepresenting history with a biased retelling of the facts. However, when playwrights and filmmakers take a historical event and turn it into a speculative drama, then calling that history is as accurate as calling an egg slicer a banjo. HYDE PARK ON HUDSON is a banjo. Or perhaps it’s an egg slicer. I may have lost control of t...
A story in which good triumphs over evil is a standard movie narrative. We want a villain to get his comeuppance. We need to see the bad punished for their misdeeds. This is what we want from Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God. What we get instead is more complex and nuanced. Alex Gibney’s feature documentary tells a harrowing tale of the clerical sexual abuse of children. It seems easy...
People like magic. Some people. I hate magic because I have no soul. I also don’t enjoy the singing of Julie Andrews for the same reason. (Sound of Music fans please leave your insults in the comments box below.) THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE is about maintaining one’s child-like joy in the art of illusion. I wish I could say it was otherwise, but AccessReel insists that I review the movie I saw...
