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One of the most rewarding experiences when watching a film is encountering an entirely unexpected performance. For all of the obvious reasons, most audience members go into a movie knowing who’s going to carry the lead roles. Such that, it’s not generally a surprise that a movie starring someone like Isabelle Huppert or Michael Caine, for example, is going to feature, at the very minimum, an engaging lead actor. (Fill in the blanks based on your own tastes and preference, of course. Maybe you’re a massive Jake Busey fan. I don’t know.) Of course, getting the very thing that you expect feels satisfying. That’s undeniable. But what happens when an actor appears in the role of a tertiary character

“He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.” Those are the lyrics from Leonard Cohen’s melancholy song The Stranger Song, which sets up the equally melancholy masterpiece from Robert Altman McCabe & Mrs. Miller, because every character is looking for a place to call home.

The film that’s referred to as an anti-western is…

Being a wife is some heavy sh*t. I in fact was raised to be a wife, an upper-middle class American Jewish wife, to be precise. Obviously this education proved a massive failure, but impressive and ongoing campaigns on the level of Hannibal's pachyderm army were employed…

For Memorial Day, I thought I would talk about the most Memorial Day kind of movie there is, as it’s about war and dying in battle, but it’s not sad or depressing. Production started on September 2, 1945, the exact day that the war ended, and is a tribute to all of the people who lost their lives in that terrible conflict, while also being about a man who refuses to accept his fate…

Gather round, children, and I will tell you a tale.

Back in the olden days, there was no streaming, no DVRs, no DVDs, no VCRs, no Roku, no cable channels beyond Z Channel, which was a local ​to LA premium cable channel before the term existed, and it didn’t matter anyway, because we didn’t have it at my house. There were just the broadcast stations ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and the local stations KTLA, KTTV, KCAL, and KCOP…

Josh and Benny Safdie have been making low budget films in New York for over ten years, mostly in and around Queens and Manhattan. They’ve been known to just use random people on the streets as their actors. In 2014, they released a movie based on a book written by Arielle Holmes, about her real life as a homeless heroin addict entitled Heaven Knows What. They cast Arielle herself to play the lead. It’s a fantastic film this critic highly recommends, however this piece…

I was looking for something to watch, and nothing was really popping for me, so I went over to Prime and what right on the first page was Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, because I recently put it on my watchlist when I was reminded that I had planned on seeing it in 2019 and then completely forgot about it! So, perfect timing.

For me, Fiddler on the Roof is Zero Mostel. I even saw him play Tevye…

Matt (Ed Helms) is a 45 year old single man who knows one thing for certain, that he wants to be a father. So what do you do when you have the means and the desire, but no partner? You find yourself a donor egg and a gestational surrogate, that’s what you do.

Anna (Patti Harrison) is a 26 year old single woman who…