— by RON WILKINSON — Sacha Baron Cohen pulls out all of the stops in this rip roaring political crucifixion of, well, everything. Timed, no doubt, for the eve of the presidential election, Cohen serves notice that things are wrong with the American world view and he is going to make sure[...]
Author Archive
Review: Nocturne
— by RON WILKINSON — How far would you go to be the best piano player in the world? In the case of Juliet, it turns out she will go quite a ways, including having sex with a surrogate devil and suffering black eyes out of nowhere. And that is before the spontaneous bleeding from [&hellip[...]
Review: The Lie
— by RON WILKINSON — How far would you go to protect your family? Probably not far if your daughter was a jerk like Kayla. But that is not the point. Suspend disbelief for an hour or two and enter the world of Jay and Becca, Kayla’s estranged parents about to be brought back together [[...]
Review: Evil Eye
— by RON WILKINSON — An attack out of nowhere leaves a young woman barely alive. Her attacker is dead, at least dead as far as we know. Thirty years later, she tells her daughter, “He is dead, but not gone.” The stage is set for intercontinental mother-daughter bonding-bondage in New[...]
Review: Black Box
— by RON WILKINSON — There was a car accident. A very bad accident that killed a man’s wife, the mother of his child, the love of his life. The accident damaged his brain and caused memory loss. At least partial memory loss. The memories are coming back. Memories of things that do [...]
Review: Don’t Read This on a Plane
— by RON WILKINSON — A young, aspiring writer gets her first big break when her novel is published. Walking out the door for her exciting round of readings to promote the book, she gets the perfect phone call from her perfect publisher. He and the company are perfectly bankrupt and she i[...]
Review: Kajillionaire
— by RON WILKINSON — Three down-on-their luck locals shuffle through what may be the seediest neighborhood in Los Angeles. The dust, trash and heat have sucked the life out of everything in sight, desiccating the forlorn trio into little more than ragged floppy clothes that turn them int[...]
Review: Notturno
— by RON WILKINSON — In the battlefields of the Middle East, the background of war has permeated too many hours of everyday life. Civilians suffer the consequences of greed, avarice and doomed religious utopias and then are constantly reminded of those traumas by geographical institution[...]
Review: Buoyancy
— by RON WILKINSON — Cambodian Chakra is a slave in his own family. As tradition requires, his family’s farm will go to his older brother and Chakra will be a laborer for the family for the rest of his life. His protests are met with stern rebukes by his father. “Don’t complain, yo[...]
Review: Driven to Abstraction
— by RON WILKINSON — Faking works of art is a timeless tradition. Michelangelo is said to have faked a sculpture in the 15th century, making the work himself and then burying it to make it look older and fabricated by a presumably more esteemed artist. The buyer was so impressed with the[...]
Review: Tesla
— by RON WILKINSON — Considering he brought electricity into our homes, invented motors we use every day and established the foundations of radio, we forgive this snippet’s lack of detail. Instead, writer/director Michael Almereyda takes us into the dreamscape of Nikola Tesla. At least[...]
Review: Skin Walker
— by RON WILKINSON — When Udo Kier is part of the cast all you have to do is sharpen the knives, load the rifle, bring out the hand-held sledge and the rest takes care of itself. Small comfort to Regine, a fragile waif who left daddy Claus ten years earlier when the memories of […[...]
Review: Scheme Birds
— by RON WILKINSON — It does not matter where the steel went, England or China. What is left in Motherwell Scotland is a regiment of left-behinds who have no future, and they do not even know it. A documentary almost without hope, the protagonist Gemma, a child growing into a woman, suff[...]
Review: Bacurau
— by RON WILKINSON — In the third world, a water truck on the road means one thing, there are people at the end of the trip who will die without it. They may have had water once, years or decades ago. Due to climate change, resource extraction or corporate manipulation, that water is gon[...]