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Review: 'You Hurt My Feelings' - Little Lies

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Lies of the little-white variety are one of life's most useful social lubricants. Let's say your loved one asks you how they look, or how you like this gift they've brought, or this steaming slice of broccoli pie they just set before you. Are you really going to feel a need to muster honest answers to such questions? To volunteer that the loved ...Read more

Review: 'Blackberry' - Call Me

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Office life -- that dismal existence parceled out in claustrophobic work cubes where desperate employees struggle to one-up each other and demonstrate their mettle to casually cruel bosses who often couldn't care less -- can be soul-crushing, as many know. And so, lives lived in the fluorescent glare of company offices have provided dramatic ...Read more

Review: 'Sanctuary' - Take Off Your Pants

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

There are about five minutes in "Sanctuary" in which nothing really strange happens. They come right at the beginning. We see a classy blonde knocking on the door of a luxury hotel suite and then a guy opening up and inviting her in. He brings out a bottle and we wonder if there's some sort of kicky sex romp in the offing. In any other movie, ...Read more

Review: 'The Taking' has Cowboys and Native Americans

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

You may not think you've ever been to Monument Valley, but you almost certainly have. Filmmakers have been coming to this vast sprawl of sunbaked desert on the Utah-Arizona border for more than a hundred years now, so it's been featured in all kinds of movies, among them "Easy Rider," "2001: A Space Odyssey" (in which it did duty as an alien ...Read more

Review: 'Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret' and 'Sisu' -- Up With Girls, Down With Nazis

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Margaret Simon is 11 years old and she's living in hell. Well, actually she's living in suburban New Jersey. But when you're on the cusp of womanhood and awaiting the arrival of certain physical signifiers of which there have so far been no signs at all, Margaret is here to tell you she's living in hell.

"Are You There, God? It's Me, ...Read more

Review: 'Little Richard - I Am Everything'... Rip It Up

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Little Richard -- or the Great Little Richard, to give him his full title -- really was everything, or close to it. As we see in the exhilarating new documentary that takes off from this idea -- "Little Richard: I Am Everything" -- the late star lit up several worlds over the course of his 87 years. Born black and handicapped (one of his legs ...Read more

Review: 'Beau Is Afraid' - Long Story

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

"Beau Is Afraid" comes to us quivering with critical buzz. The writer-director, Ari Aster, has made some electrifying contributions to the horror genre in recent years with his first two films, "Hereditary" (2018) and "Midsommar" (2019). And his star this time out, the strange and wonderful Joaquin Phoenix, is certainly a man who knows his way ...Read more

Review: In 'Paint' Owen Wilson Channels the Spirit of the Late PBS Art Star Bob Ross

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

It's not easy being Carl Nargle. Sure, he's the most famous painter in Vermont. But that's entirely because of an art-instruction show he hosts called "The Joy of Painting," which has been beaming out of the Burlington PBS station for 22 years. The provincial stardom this show has brought him has been richly fulfilling, especially on the carnal ...Read more

Review: 'A Good Person' and 'Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game'

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

In the wake of "John Wick: Chapter 4," is anybody ready for a kinder, gentler sort of movie? Oh. OK. Well, there are two such unanticipated films upon us anyway. One is an unabashedly teary family drama about grief and drug addiction; the other concerns the near-50-year struggle to legalize pinball machines in New York City. In neither of these ...Read more

Review: 'The Lost King' - Searching for Richard

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

William Shakespeare, the noted playwright and lying knave, gets a bit of comeuppance in "The Lost King," a movie that seeks to rescue Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet monarchs, from 400 years of bad-mouthing in one of Shakespeare's most famous plays. According to the Bard's "Richard III," which was written around 1593, the titular king ...Read more

Review: 'John Wick: Chapter 4' Has Our Hero On the Road Again

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Many things happen in the nearly three hours it takes the new John Wick movie to unfurl. Many, many things. Among them:

There's a spectacular eruption of kung fu, gun fu, car fu and WTF fu as our man Wick (Keanu Reeves) circles around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, desperately wrestling the wheel of a careening muscle car whose driver's-side ...Read more

Some Scattered Oscars Thoughts

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

"All Quiet on the Western Front"

"Avatar: The Way of Water"

"The Banshees of Inisherin"

"Elvis"

"Everything Everywhere All at Once"

"The Fabelmans"

"Tar"

"Top Gun: Maverick"

"Triangle of Sadness"

"Women Talking"

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BEST DIRECTOR

Martin McDonagh -- "The Banshees of Inisherin"

Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert -- "Everything ...Read more

Review: 'Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre' - Jason Statham in an Underpowered Guy Ritchie Spy Flick

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

It's been a while since anyone went to the trouble of making a James Bond knockoff, but here comes Guy Ritchie to take a fresh whack at it. Back in the mid-1960s, after "Goldfinger" supercharged the nascent 007 franchise, the movie landscape swarmed with Bond rips. They ranged from kind-of-entertaining (James Coburn's "Our Man Flint") to fairly ...Read more

 

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