In novels, I love unreliable narrators. I find the precarity of the truth titillating, even thrilling, especially as I slowly discover that what I’m reading isn’t to be trusted. I become a detective, looking for clues to what is really going on. It’s why I love Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, Peter Cameron’s Andorra, and,…
The odd distribution plan for the exceptional Other People says a great deal about how film has changed with the advent of streaming services, especially in regards to independent film. In the past, movies with tiny budgets and niche audiences (especially gay ones) could only be found in art houses in large cities before showing…
Ira Sachs, the director of the acclaimed gay films Keep the Lights On and Love is Strange, is a subtle filmmaker. There’s nothing flashy in his shots or his dialogue, and he doesn’t push his actors to histrionics; his movies are naturalistic portrayals of real people struggling with family duty, class, aging and love. With…
Florence Foster Jenkins, who lived from 1868 to 1944, was an eccentric heiress who used her considerable financial resources to stage and promote her musical career. She needed to use her own money because, despite having as a child been somewhat of a piano-playing prodigy, she was a terrible singer, probably both tone and beat…
Aside from making a great deal of money, there was no reason to make another Jason Bourne movie. After three of them – The Bourne Identity, Supremacy, and Ultimatum – the amnesiac assassin that the CIA tried to get rid of has regained his memories and gotten revenge. Plenty of people were killed, cars were…
dvr this TNT, Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Animal Kingdom is loosely based on the Oscar-nominated 2010 Australian film of the same name; it keeps the basic premise, a family of career criminals headed by a steely mom, and ramps up the sex and sociopathology. Instead of Jacki Weaver as the mother nicknamed Smurf, we have professional…
As we were walking into Swiss Army Man, I discovered that my friend Adam, who I’d brought to the movie, didn’t know anything about what we were about to see. I giggled, because I knew that the movie was about a guy stranded on a deserted island who befriends a farting corpse. Adam was going…
In April of 1990, the Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center opened its doors to Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of the famed photographer who just recently died from AIDS. I was 15 and had grown up in the Queen City, as it was called, and Dennis Barrie, the director of the CAC, and his…
I was unable to see the mega-hyped, mega-budget Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice before other critics ran their reviews. And because many of the reviewers were so dismissive or so hyperbolic in their criticism, the news of the film’s opening was overshadowed by the blood sport of Internet overkill. The Wall Street Journal’s Joe…
dvd of the week Michael Fassbender was nominated for an Oscar playing Apple founder Steve Jobs, who is on screen at virtually every moment in the film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle. Few of his dialogue partners – played by Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and Jeff Daniels, among others – are…
