Film Reviews

Italian-Americans "Play Ball!" in Sports Documentary

Italian-Americans "Play Ball!" in Sports Documentary

Local Newspapers Fight Extinction in Documentary

Local Newspapers Fight Extinction in Documentary

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Italian Cultural Center's Film Series Returns with Il Campione

By Bob Ruggiero
Sep 11, 2020

Sometimes, stereotypes exist for a reason. Among the Europeans, the Italian culture is very much a touchy-feely one. There are a lot of hugs and kisses and embraces and talking loudly and closely with operatic hand gestures. So in the Age of Coronavirus with its masking and social distancing and...
MFAH Puts "Jazz on Film" and In Your Ear

By Bob Ruggiero
May 30, 2019

For the seventh anniversary of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s “Jazz on Film” series, Founder and Curator Peter Lucas has once again put together a screening schedule as varied as the music itself. Running over three weekends, it includes a mixture of material from the Jimmy Stewart drama Anatomy...
On the Basis of Sex Shrewdly Makes RBG Into a Feminist Jimmy Stewart

By Alan Scherstuhl
Jan 4, 2019

Leder’s film mostly devotes itself to the future Supreme Court justice’s first world-shaking sex discrimination case, 1972’s Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue: Ginsburg and her husband ... argued against a discriminatory statute before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
Welcome to Marwen Crashes Into the Limits of Hollywood’s Imagination

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 27, 2018

At times, as it dissolves between scenes of its cast as literal toy dolls machine-gunning Nazis in the made-up Belgian town of Marwen, Zemeckis’ movie seems an inquisition into the limits of the director’s own imagination
Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Does James Baldwin Proud

By Chuck Wilson
Dec 25, 2018

Baldwin’s central story, dialogue and time-jumping narrative structure are all in place, but so, too, is a sumptuous visual style that serves to deepen the novelist’s themes of racial injustice and the powerful countering force of love
Vice Can’t Make Sense of Dick Cheney, but It Can Give You a Headache

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 24, 2018

Don’t look to Vice for psychology or even a sense of presence; McKay uses the Cheneys’ grim unknowability as an excuse not to bother going for either
Ben Is Back Pits a Dazzling Julia Roberts Against the Opioid Scourge

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 21, 2018

With the quickest blink or nervy glance, Roberts communicates to us both what her character, an ordinary woman named Holly Burns, has convinced everyone around her to think she’s feeling but also all of her secret doubts, fury and anguish
Aquaman Proves Superheroes Are Better Down Where It’s Wetter

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 19, 2018

Not incidental to Aquaman’s pleasures is its vision of a mixed-race hero, played by a mixed-race actor, fighting to protect and understand clashing aspects of his heritage
Emily Blunt Rules, and Mary Poppins Returns Is Not at All Atrocious

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 18, 2018

True to the spirit of the chipper, somewhat aimless live-action Disney day killers that inspired it, Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns gets better the further it wanders from its actual story.
Cities Roll, Fight and Eat Each Other in the Otherwise Meh Mortal Engines

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 15, 2018

The film plays as if a three-hour epic has been sliced down to size in the editing, but only the scenes establishing character and context have been cut
In Mary Queen of Scots, Great Women Face Hard Truths About Wielding Power

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 14, 2018

The actresses share only one scene in the film, but Mary Queen of Scots sets them up in counterpoint, two divergent approaches to the question of how women who wield power can actually govern the men around them
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma Is a Masterpiece of Memory

By Yolanda Machado
Dec 6, 2018

The writer-director shot Roma in chronological order, without showing the cast the script, unveiling it to the actors the same way it is for the audience, piece by piece, a chance to marinate in each moment as it plays out
With Mowgli, Netflix Has Its First Blockbuster

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 6, 2018

This time, though, the lessons are urgent, the jungle threatened by man, the wicked tiger Shere Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) a true terror vowing to one day taste that boy’s blood
Into the Spider-Verse Is the Best Superhero Movie Since The Dark Knight

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 6, 2018

It sets a host of alternative Spider-folk running amok in the New York City of Brooklyn teen Miles Morales, the mixed-race Spider-Man (his father is black and his mother Latinx) invented for the comics in 2011 by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli
Savory Chef Flynn Reveals the Promise and Price of Being a Teen Wonder

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 5, 2018

... It’s a mother’s story, with Yates following not just Flynn but also Meg McGarry, a filmmaker herself, who has been documenting for years her son’s culinary blossoming — and her encouragement
Netflix’s Exquisite Happy as Lazzaro Asks: What’s to Live for After a Life of Toil?

By Alan Scherstuhl
Nov 30, 2018

This time, we meet the sharecropping peasants of the remote village of Inviolata, living lives of seasonal toil, lives that look — except for the occasional radio or lightbulb — like they might have a century or so ago
HBO’s United Skates Takes a Thrilling Spin Through Roller-Skate Culture

By Alan Scherstuhl
Nov 29, 2018

And much of the present-day free-skate footage, shot at what have come to be known as “Adult Nights” at skating rinks, also proves invigorating, an invitation to relish the momentum, the joy and the peacocking pride of grown-up skaters
Emma Stone and The Favourite’s Royal Women Scheme Deliciously

By Bilge Ebiri
Nov 22, 2018

It’s the early 18th century, there’s a war on with France, and the persistently ill, somewhat childish Anne struggles both to assert her authority and to preserve her kingdom and her crown
Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate Invites Us to Look Through Van Gogh’s Eyes

By Alan Scherstuhl
Nov 21, 2018

Probing the painter’s senses as he tramps about the south of France, Schnabel’s film is drunk with light, a little touched in the head itself, giving over to van Gogh’s perspective through gorgeously disorienting POV shots ...
The Latest Robin Hood Robs From the Past to Give the Present Nothing

By Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Nov 20, 2018

The actual 2018 Robin Hood remains a haphazard action thriller taking place sometime during the Crusades, with Taron Egerton basically reprising his breakout Kingsman role as a scrappy normie getting recruited and trained for skilled combat

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