Where are you in life versus where you thought you would be? Or perhaps where the world says you are supposed to be? Noah Baumbach’s refreshing While We’re Young is a Woody Allen-esque, sidewalks of New York comedy, but one that sparkles with insights…
Read MoreGood intentions do not a good movie make, and the well-meaning Desert Dancer, the true story of Iran’s Afshin Ghaffarian, who challenged his country’s ban on dancing by forming a clandestine dance troupe before being beaten down by Iran’s political climate and eventually escaping…
Read MoreEverything that worked in 2011’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel—a fully-lived in collection of senior characters going through crisis, reinvention, love and death played by a sterling cast of grand thesps investing a perfect blend of humor and pathos—is missing from its formulaic, by…
Read MoreTrai Byers, the Yale-trained grad currently starring on Fox's surprise hit Empire, which has dominated ratings for seven straight weeks, is having a moment. With the one-two punch of a featured role in the Oscar-nominated Selma and now a high-profile turn as the CFO…
Read MoreFit for a King: Colm Feore’s Devastating Lear Brings Stratford, and the Bard, to Movie Audiences

Colm Feore’s towering, career-defining work as King Lear in Stratford Festival’s currently playing movie adaptation of last summer’s theatrical production is a raw, powerful portrait of Lear as a man of family and state, in that order, a younger and more vigorously vital patriarch…
Read MoreWriter/Director Richard LaGravenese on The Last Five Years, and the Last Few Decades of His Career as One of Hollywood’s Best Movie Dramatists

Prolific Hollywood screenwriter and director Richard LaGravenese’s new picture, the bittersweet The Last Five Years, based on the off-Broadway musical and starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan as young Manhattan transplants who fall into and out of careers, love and life together, was a…
Read MorePart Zalman King soft core, part David Cronenberg mind fuck and all ludicrously misguided, the stylish S&M fantasia Fifty Shades of Grey is being marketed as a young adult love story—just in time for Valentine’s Day—and as such, one wonders just what sort of…
Read MoreKevin Costner’s conflicted, weary performance as an LA attorney embroiled in a battle for custody of his bi-racial granddaughter is the best of several strong suits in Black or White, writer-director Mike Binder’s thoughtful examination of parenthood, race and identity. While not a perfect…
Read MoreBlack Sea, the new submarine thriller starring Jude Law as a disenfranchised former captain looking for a payday—and redemption—by treasure hunting for sunken gold, is a fast-paced, well-acted and mostly thoughtful movie wound tightly by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald. Law stars as a career…
Read MoreNothing is Black or White as Kevin Costner Takes on Grief, Race and Single-Parenting in Career Performance

There isn’t a more affable star than Oscar-winner Kevin Costner, the iconic actor-director with so many modern classics in his canon—Dances with Wolves, JFK, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, A Perfect World—and an artist who brings a patented movie star sheen to every performance.…
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