— by WILLIAM STERR — This is a difficult, even infuriating, movie. Most of us are familiar with the story of how the tobacco industry fought for decades to obscure the fact about tobacco use, addiction and health issues. We’ve seen the same thing with fossil fuels and opioids. French w[...]
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Review: The Whale
— by WILLIAM STERR — In 2012, Darren Aronofsky (“Mother!”), attended a performance of “The Whale,” a play by Samuel Hunter. A decade later, he directed a movie version with Hunter as screenwriter and Brendan Fraser (“Gods and Monsters”) starring as the protagonist, Ch[...]
Review: The First Step
— by BEV QUESTAD — If you tend to watch CNN then you probably know the handsome, well-spoken Yale Law School commentator whose rich voice speaks with passion. On the night of the 2016 election he somberly intoned: “It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids:[...]
Review: Alchemy of the Spirit
— by WILLIAM STERR — Oliver Black (Xander Berkeley – “Butcher’s Crossing) is an artist. He works out of a studio in his home in a village in Vermont. One fall morning, he wakes to find his wife, Evelyn (Sarah Clarke – “Coda”) dead beside him. His trauma is intense – she[...]
Review: Marlowe
— by WILLIAM STERR — Let me introduce you to something interesting. We’ll call it “The Case of Three Marlowes.” Once upon a time in California, way back in 1939, a detective fiction writer by the name of Raymond Chandler, published a novel, “Farewell, My Lovely,” featuring the [...]
Review: After Love
— by BEV QUESTAD — The day after the death of her husband, a British woman, whose home is in Dover, learns about a surprise her husband left behind across the Channel in Calais. This alone is intriguing enough, but the widow is a Muslim, all wrapped up in a hijab … with striking blue [[...]
Review: Wolf Garden
— by WILLIAM STERR — Have you ever walked into a restaurant and ordered a juicy hamburger with all the trimmings? And when the server brings the meal, you see the tempting sesame seed bun, the crisp lettuce and the ripe tomato slice, the aroma of Bermuda onion and dill pickle. But when y[...]
Review: Orchestrator of Storms
— by WILLIAM STERR — “Orchestrator of Storms” relates the life and career of the late French director Jean Rollin. While Rollin was a prolific writer, his supreme love was the production of films, almost exclusively in the “le cinema fantastique” genre. As such, his low budget pr[...]
Review: El Equipo
— by WILLIAM STERR — In 1976, a military coup overthrew legitimately elected Argentinian President Isabel Peron and established a military government that lasted until 1983. Shortly after the coup, American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger urged the coup leaders to destroy their enemie[...]
Review: Navalny
— by BEV QUESTAD — Early on in this remarkable Oscar-nominated documentary, Alexei Navalny is asked, “If you are killed, what message do you leave for the Russian people?” Navalny is the handsome 41-year-old lawyer who campaigned against business and government corruption in Russia. [...]
Review: Enys Men
— by WILLIAM STERR — A woman (Mary Woodvine – “Bait”) wearing a red windbreaker makes her way across blustery hills of heather and sedge, then down to the edge of a cliff where six strange flowers grow. These are rare plants on this Cornish island and her job is to measure the temp[...]
Review: Till
— by WILLIAM STERR — Most adult in America are aware of the story of Emmett Till. He was a young Black American from Chicago who traveled to Mississippi in 1955 to visit relatives. There, he ran afoul of southern sentiments and was brutally murdered by a gang of white men. They believed [...]
Review: Motherland
— by BEV QUESTAD — What genocide began on Sept. 27, 2020? I posed that question to a social justice group who tracks this kind of thing. One person was sure of the answer, correctly, but the other 12 disagreed, asserting his answer couldn’t be true because they hadn’t heard of it. Az[...]