Leyla (Mala Emde) and Tristen (Jonas Dassler) are a couple in crisis. Leyla is dealing with depression and a disinterest in engaging with the world around her. Around others, she’s subdued and has since stopped working. The image of Leyla sinking below the surface as the light above her grows dim reappears throughout the film, like a reminder of the feelings she can’t describe. The marks on her arms are the scars of her previous battles with these feelings before. Her caring husband Tristen agrees to join her on a private island retreat at the suggestion of Leyla’s old friend,

Review-Skin Deep

DreamWorks and Netflix’s “Orion and the Dark” does the Pixar Thing better than most recent Pixar movies. It so blatantly cribs from the Prime Pixar notebook of humanizing the impossible in films like “Inside Out” and “Toy Story” that it actually directly references the latter in its prologue. The good news is that it builds on a template instead of just shallowly copying it like so many other Pixar wannabes. This one hits familiar chords, to be sure, but it works because it blends writer Charlie Kaufman’s unique sense of storytelling with a heartfelt tale of a boy who just wants

Review-Orion and the Dark

A feature length debut, Molly Manning Walker’s “How to Have Sex” is a blisteringly real survey of female coming of age. Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis), and Skye (Lara Peake) are three teen best friends who go on holiday to Crete for what is meant to be the best girls’ trip summer can offer. Partaking in the rites of a romanticized wild youth—getting drunk, partying, and having sex—are the three bullet points on their itinerary. Tara in particular has the goal of losing her virginity, and the girls band together to make sure every box on their rubric for

Review-How to Have Sex

“The Promised Land” is about ten movies in one. It’s a history lesson with a central figure driven by an impossible quest. There are bands of outlaws, sadistic aristocrats, and downtrodden peasants. There’s a little romance, a lot of torture, as well as a feisty runaway child. Historical epics like this really aren’t made anymore. There are so many different chapters of the central conflict it makes the final confrontation inevitable and therefore a little predictable. However, there’s still unexpected space, and the film takes its time, allowing for character development and emotional connection. It’s a wonder that “The Promised

Review-The Promised Land

I was not the only one in the audience who let out a yelp of joy when I saw Chita Rivera in the diner scene of “…tick…tick…boom.” In the credits, her role is simply identified as “Broadway legend.” Ms. Rivera, who died this week at age 91, is synonymous with that term. Many people are lauded Broadway stars, but very few seem to have been born out of the dreams of the angels (metaphoric and financial) behind Broadway musicals. She was a galvanizing, unforgettable star, decade after decade, creating iconic roles including the original Anita in West Side Story, Rosie

Review-Broadway Legend: Chita Rivera (1933-2024)

It’s hard to believe but the nostalgia machine that repurposes everything that was a hit before has reached the 2000s, getting to Doug Liman’s 2005 blockbuster “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” the film that notoriously united Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt forever in pop culture history. While the new Amazon Prime Video series loosely based on that film has a very different structure and tone, its greatest strength is strikingly similar. Roger wrote of the 2005 hit, “There is a kind of movie that consists of watching two people together on the screen. The plot is immaterial. What matters is the “chemistry,”

Review-Prime Video’s Update of Mr. and Mrs. Smith Crackles with Wit and Creative Energy

It’s astonishing to realize that HBO’s hit sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has been on the air for a solid twenty-five years. That’s a quarter decade of star/creator Larry David ambling about life in LA as a heightened version of himself, bumbling his way into one farcical situation after another—most of them of his own making. But after twelve seasons of heavily improvised antics, the now 76-year-old David is hanging up his hat for good, grousing his way into the California sunset. And what a batch of misadventures to go out on. Ending “Curb” is a fitting challenge for man who’s

Review-Curb Your Enthusiasm Ends on a Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good Note

The one constant of life is change, and our own individual relations to the place we grew up, or came of age, in are invariably complicated not by just the alterations in the landscape but the way our perspectives shift. Shortly before his death, the great filmmaker Orson Welles wanted to shoot a film based on his real-life experience producing the play The Cradle Will Rock in New York. (The project was brought to fruition many years after Welles’ death, in a film rather disrespectful of Welles directed by Tim Robbins, who had some nerve.) Roger Hill, Welles’ mentor and

Review-Pictures of Ghosts