Rudy Mancuso (played by . . . Rudy Mancuso) lives in a slightly different universe than the rest of us. Where we hear the rumble of city life, Rudy hears rhythm and music. Where we see people going about their daily lives, Rudy sees syncopated choreography. And that’s the universe that Mancuso, as director and co-writer of MUSICA, has externalized for our delight and delectation. His is a vivid style that evokes both THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBORG in its stylization and anything by the Muppets in its blending of reality and fantasy into a whole that is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving. R ..read more

PURE O begins with its protagonist, Cooper (in an arresting Daniel Dorr), alone in his car and in emotional extremis, listening to his own voice describing how he will murder the love of his life with the knife that is sits with an unnatural glow next to him. It is the stuff of horror films, and in this case that is what writer/director Dillon Tucker has given us, but not the usual type. The demon that has Cooper by the throat isn’t supernatural, rather, it is a type of OCD that plays and replays disturbing, sometimes violent, thoughts in his mind until he is sure that he will go insane, if he ..read more

Click here to listen to the interview. When I spoke with Paula Apsell via Zoom on April 10, 2024, I couldn’t help but start by thanking her for making a film that portrayed Jews in the Holocaust as something other than passive victims. That narrative is all too familiar, and for too many years, was the only one remembered. Apsell, who retired from producing PBS’ Nova, was determined to change that. She accomplishes that with her documentary, RESISTANCE: THEY FOUGHT BACK, a riveting story of Jews who refused to allow themselves to be defeated in spirit, and who often found a way to fight back i ..read more

Social change has come to 1920s Littlehampton in the person of Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a foul-mouthed pub-roisterer of an Irish immigrant to this sleepy little English town. More specifically, her unconventional choices, including raising her daughter on her own and living with a man (Malachi Kirby) to whom she is not married, predictably raise eyebrows among the townsfolk, and the hackles of Edward Swan, the paterfamilias of the home that shares a very thin wall (and a loo) with Rose. So, when a series of profanity-laced, anatomically specific letters begin arriving addressed to Edith ..read more

RESTORE POINT is a first-rate noir set in a near-dystopian near future. The year in 2041, and the social and economic unrest plaguing Middle Europe has resulted in such violence that a new civil right has been bestowed on its residents. Anyone found to have been killed as a result of violence is guaranteed a resurrection. Filmmaker Robert Hloz doesn’t waste any time in this lean and brutal film trying to explain how this is done because in the scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. Instead, he focuses on what the implications are for people who can come back from the dead, but with one ca ..read more

IN THE LAND OF SAINTS AND SINNERS is a melancholy study of the futility of violence. Set in the war-torn Northern Ireland of 1974, it features a performance by Liam Neeson that is considered, measured, and infinitely eloquent for its silences in a story that eschews politics as it finely observes the consequences of choices, good and bad. Neeson is Finbar Murphy, a war veteran and hitman based in a rural village in Donegal. The latter experience left him hollow inside, as did the death of his beloved wife while he was away. Hollow, but not bereft of feeling, an irony considering his profession ..read more

GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE begins with a lonely Kong suffering the pain of an infected tooth, and the loneliness of being the last of his kind. It’s a good place to start, and if the filmmakers had stayed with the big guy on his adventures, this would have been a much better flick. Instead, they expanded the action to include the humans from the last film in this franchise (NEVER to be confused with the infinitely superior GODZILLA MINUS ONE franchise), and things went downhill from there. Not that some of the humans aren’t fun. Certainly, Dan Stevens as Trapper, the holistic hippie veter ..read more

There is so much to admire about Julio Torres’s PROBLEMISTA, from its magnificent manifestations of metaphor to its tweaking of subjective norms and random exploitation in a provocative satire as dark as night, but as hopeful as a buoyant full moon. The one that reigns supreme, though, is what Torres has done with the desperate, incendiary monster of the piece, played with crackling clarity by Tilda Swinton. In a film about following a dream, she is the catalyst that transforms its protagonist, Alejandro Martinez (Torres), an immigrant from El Salvador, from a young man playing by the rules to ..read more

The important takeaway from GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE, and, if one is being blunt, the only reason for it to exist, aside from those delightful miniature Stay-Puft marshmallow imps, is the delightful discovery that Kumail Nanjiani may very well be the cinematic heir of Bill Murray. Certainly, they are the only ones who consistently seem to understand that the reason for the original’s success as a supernatural comedy was that it was so very ridiculous, and that the best way to play that is with the delicious ironic remove that those two fine thespians embrace so well. It almost makes up for ..read more

The first and last words spoken in IMMACULATE are the Hail Mary. That prayer takes on very different meanings in each context, and in between them we have a film that is uneven, but oddly fascinating. Taken on one level, it is a screed against the patriarchy, with a woman reduced to her womb. On another level, it’s a fairly rote example of the horror sub-genre involving scary nuns and problems of blind faith run amok. The womb in question belongs to Sister Cecelia (Sydney Sweeney), a sweet and innocent young American newly arrived in Italy to take her final vows. Alone in the world and haunted ..read more