August 6th, 2024
By Greg Carlson
Vivacious, candid, and magnetic as ever, the now 83-year-old silver screen legend Faye Dunaway is profiled in a feature length documentary by veteran Laurent Bouzereau for HBO. With the full participation of the outspoken star and her son Liam, Bouzereau’s “Faye” cherry-picks key milestones that form a serviceable overview of one of the most electrifying American movie icons to emerge in the class of late 1960s New Hollywood talents. The most…
August 3rd, 2024
By Greg Carlson
Writer/director/performer Kit Zauhar’s indieworld ascendancy continues its upward trajectory with sophomore feature “This Closeness,” which enjoyed a limited theatrical release this summer following a world premiere at South by Southwest in 2023. The movie is now available on streaming platform MUBI. The action unfolds in a cheap, two-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia that is being offered by Adam (Ian Edlund) as a kind of Airbnb/homestay spot…
July 26th, 2024
By Greg Carlson
Even though he is only fifty years old, Osgood “Oz” Perkins has been linked to the legacy of his father’s titanic portrayal of Norman Bates for more than four decades, when he appeared onscreen in 1983 as the younger version of Bates in “Psycho II.” As an adult, Perkins has now put together a trio of attention-grabbing feature projects as writer-director (with another, an adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Monkey,” on the way). “
July 8th, 2024
By Greg Carlson
With the welcome participation of several actors who gave their giddy all in the more exuberant fantasia of “Poor Things,” the follow-up from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the more measured melancholy and surrealist stylings of “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” “The Lobster,” and “Dogtooth.” “Kinds of Kindness” is an anthology of three dark and woeful tales in which the central cast members play new roles each time the…
July 7th, 2024
By Greg Carlson
Originally conceived by writer-director Christy Hall as a stage play, the movie “Daddio” premiered in September of 2023 at the Telluride Film Festival. Featuring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn as the only two significant characters with spoken dialogue in a credited cast of four (a curbside valet connects rider to car and we briefly glimpse a little girl in an adjacent vehicle), the story traces a late-night, near real-time journey from JFK to a…
June 24th, 2024
By Greg Carlson
German filmmaker Julia von Heinz aims for the poignant and the sincere in “Treasure,” starring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry as daughter and father travelers coming to grips with the terrible past and their strained relationship. Based on Australian writer Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical novel “Too Many Men,” the adaptation has, in no small measure due to its blend of the tragic and the comic, divided viewers and critics. Set at the…
June 17th, 2024
Daina Pusić’s feature narrative debut “Tuesday” premiered at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival last September. A joint production of A24, BBC Film and the British Film Institute, the movie stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Lola Petticrew as mother and child on a journey toward the death of the latter from a terminal illness. In an unorthodox bit of character design, the principal performers are joined by the manifestation of Death as a CGI-enhanced macaw voiced with a gravelly rasp by…
June 17th, 2024
By Greg Carlson
In their previous feature, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival Next selection “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” director Jane Schoenbrun shaped the raw materials of electronically-mediated internet communication to explore thresholds, boundaries, and the construction of identities. “I Saw the TV Glow,” while no less raw and unsettling, marks a significant step in the filmmaker’s evolution, shifting from the more directly participatory…
June 3rd, 2024
By Greg Carlson
A more than serviceable portrait of the beloved artist, “Jim Henson: Idea Man” debuts on Disney+ this weekend. As organized by director Ron Howard, the documentary presents a primarily chronological overview of career highlights mixed with behind-the-scenes considerations of children and marriage. While the latter component is sanitized — predictably, given the full participation and cooperation of the Henson family — Howard circles the…
June 1st, 2024
By Greg Carlson
gregcarlson1@gmail.com
Ilana Glazer is the co-writer and co-star of director Pamela Adlon’s comedy “Babes,” an appealing, if familiar, buddy movie that builds around the ups and downs of an unexpected pregnancy. The busy Glazer, best known for “Broad City,” returns to the general thematic territory she explored in the 2021 horror film “False Positive” (for which she also served as performer and co-screenwriter), trading the dread – if not the anxiety –…