If the Fast & the Furious franchise has taught us anything – and arguably, it’s taught us a great deal in the life-lesson department – it’s that “family” comes first, second, and last. Anyone who doesn’t learn that lesson will be forced to relearn it in a seemingly never-ending series. Of course, super-cool cars, CGI-aided stunts, collisions, and crashes, all …
Bob Hope Salutes the Troops (Time Life) is a collection of Bob Hope’s TV specials across five decades. Hope spent nearly half of his 100 Christmases heading up USO shows with loads of jokes and lots of stars to entertain the troops. He performed on battleships and battlefields, and the missions were often dangerous and their schedules strenuous. The comedian’s NBC-TV comedy and Christmas specials spanned ten Presidential administrations, from Truman to Clinton.
Harold and Lillian Michelson are the Hollywood power couple you’ve never heard of. Married for 60 years, the couple worked on dozens of major films from the 1950s through the 2000s. Lillian worked at and later owned a large research library, and Harold, a WWII vet who used the G.I. Bill to get an art degree, worked his way up from…
Bert Berns, a major figure in the early 1960s American pop and R&B recording scene, was certainly unsung, but it would be a stretch to call him a hero. A musical childhood lead to a fascination with Latin and Cuban music, which in turn lead him to co-write the classic “Twist and Shout,” sung first by The Top Notes and produced by a…
La La Land (Lionsgate) is a musical that throws together two people who become attracted to each other while pursuing careers in the arts, hoping to achieve their dreams. She is Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress who works as a barista on a studio backlot. He is Seb (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist who makes ends meet by playing in a rock cover band. Her goal: to make it in the movies. His goal: to open his own jazz club.
There’s a moment near the end of Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s (One Day, An Education, Italian for Beginners) engaging, if slight, adaptation of Lissa Evans’ novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half, where Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton), a screenwriter in wartime London, watches the finished film with a paying audience. As enthralled…
In 2015, the news cycle, at least for one day, exploded with the revelation that the earth at this moment is in its sixth major extinction event, known as the Holocene. For most people, this was apparently a shrug-and-forget-it bit of news, but for director Mélanie Laurent and activist Cyril Dion, it was something more: a call to action…
The “promise” in The Promise, an unengaging, dull Doctor Zhivago meets Titanic retread starring Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale, and Charlotte Le Bon as the three sides of an uninteresting romantic triangle set against the Armenian genocide perpetuated by the collapsing Ottoman Empire during the First World War, isn’t a promise…
We can call off the search party for Katherine Heigl’s career (We found Zach Braff’s just two weeks ago, directing the already forgotten Going in Style remake). A solid start on TV (Grey’s Anatomy), a big box-office win (Knocked Up), followed by a series of increasingly dire, desperate rom-coms and two back-to-back failed TV…
Arturo knows exactly when he was conceived: December 10, 1969, the day of the Viale Lazio massacre, which took place just down the street from his parents’ home in Palermo. The mafia affects everyone’s life, declares Arturo, and he maintains that the only reason he was born at all is because most of his father’s sperm was scared…