The Jewish calendar has been a recurring theme this year. So, for the third time, I will be examining a film centered on a Jewish holiday. Also for the third time, it will be a Christian film. As always, I am open to requests. In fact, from now on, the subjects of the column will be driven by reader requests. Many thanks to those who have participated! For Karaites, December […]
Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time. This time we’re headed to Wild Wild West, nominee for eight Razzies, winner of five, bonfire for staggering amounts of money, and testament to the staying power of Will Smith in that he started getting Oscar nominations […]
This Chosen is the Jesus TV show, not the adaptation of the novel about New York Jews hitting each other with baseballs, though that one will come up, inshallah. Feel free to suggest a future topic in the comments or on Discord! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Io Saturnalia! Welcome back to Sects, Lies, and Videotape, where we look at the role of religion in film and—on very special occasions—television. And […]
Howdy, Kingdom of AE! Back in late March, I had the pleasure of sitting down with art-history-scholar-turned-Broadway-producer-turned-film-director Grant S. Johnson, whose indie spy thriller Agent Game hits theaters on April 8. Agent Game is the conspiracy-laden tale of a CIA interrogation wrong, starring a motley crew of fascinating actors, from Katie Cassidy to Barkhad Abdi to Mel Gibson. CIA officer Harris (Dermot Mulroney) is involved in missions to detain and […]
As the official Alternate Ending Razzies Correspondent – a title that, I should be clear, is my fault, in case any of you were thinking of calling the Hazing Hotline – I felt it my solemn and serious duty to write a recap of the 42nd Golden Raspberry Awards. I have since learned yet again not to trust my feelings. The Razzies have become an ugly diseased bramble of cynical […]
After having acted in two of the 21st Century’s finest slow-moving movies about space travel, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris in 2002 and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity in 2013, George Clooney has taken it upon himself to make one of his very own. And thus we have him not only directing, but headlining The Midnight Sky (his first time acting in a feature since Hail, Caesar! and Money Monster in 2016), an adaptation of Lilly […]
I cannot think of many questions less burning than “what if Santa Claus was a resentful, embittered survivalist who had been almost completely ruined by the weak economy of the 2010s, and the only thing that reignited his desire to live at all was being hunted by an extraordinarily proficient assassin; and also Mel Gibson is playing Santa as his audition to start having casting directors consider him for the […]
I do not like to start reviews with the most obvious possible statement that hundreds of people before me have already pointed out, but sometimes it doesn’t pay to be clever. And so: the 2000 ancient world epic Gladiator is quite clearly what you get when 1995’s Braveheart and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan have a baby. I would add to that standard version of the story, it’s not a very […]
It says something – and as a contented old atheist, I hardly know if I’m in a position to say what, but it’s something – that The Last Temptation of Christ could have the theologically promiscuous fatherhood of an Italian Catholic director working from a screenplay that a Calvinist writer adapted from a 1955 novel by a man raised in the Greek Orthodox church, and still feel like such a […]
Any awards aficionado knows that the Golden Globes are a bit of a joke. They are presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – a mysterious organization that has not only been accused of having bad taste but of being willing to trade votes for special attention and/or gifts. The truth is that it is a relatively small organization (about 90 members) for the standards of most televised award shows, […]
Directed by Israeli filmmaker Alma Har’el and written by Shia LaBeouf, Honey Boy is a semi-autobiographical story of two traumatic time periods in the life of a child actor named Otis Lort (played by Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges) and his father James (played by LaBeouf himself). His parents had divorced and he was on the road filming a show with his father as his paid companion. James would drive […]
And here we are, with the Oscars are coming this very weekend. Gawk in wonder as three very different people all agree that La La Land will win absolutely no fewer than 8 awards, though we are bitterly divided on just how it will subdivide the sound categories. BEST PICTURE Arrival Fences Hacksaw Ridge Hell or High Water Hidden Figures La La Land Lion Manchester by the Sea Moonlight Tim […]
