Screen Test

             Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in “Die My Love.”  Kimberly French photo via IMDb.com Jennifer Lawrence is getting all the media buzz for her fearless, bare-it-all portrayal of a young mother losing her mind in “Die My Love.” But it's hardly a one-woman show. Besides Robert Pattinson as her well-intentioned but feckless husband, and icons Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte in the supporting ranks, almost everything else on the screen becomes a co-star under Lynne Ramsey's haunting direction. A ramshackle, ghosty Montana farmhouse is almost as much a character in the story as the New York transplants Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson) who move in after he inherits it from his recently deceased uncle.  Grace and Jackson make love and engage in hand-to-hand combat – sometimes you can't tell which is which – in these spooky environs that have their own gruesome back story. The mood is eerie. It's as though the house is watching...

Margaret Qualley and Ethan Hawke in “Blue Moon.”   Sony Pictures Classics photo via IMDb Blue Moon You saw me standin' alone Without a dream in my heart Without a love of my own Ethan Hawke makes himself almost unrecognizable to play Lorenz Hart, the man who wrote those words.  Hart was five-feet tall, balding, a cigar always in his mouth, his back so curved his chin barely clears the bar at Sardi's where he spends most of the movie “Blue Moon” yakking away. His sad – if witty and sometimes brilliant – monologues are performed for bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), piano player Knuckles (Jonah Lees) and assorted folks who stop by the legendary Broadway celebrity hangout one fateful night in 1943. Showcasing the alcoholism and other sorts of self-destructiveness that would kill him at age 48 seven months later, it's a daring, all-in performance by Hawke. It's already getting buzz this awards season. Whether or not it nabs an Oscar nomination or two, it won't win many...

                Gary Oldham is Jackson Lamb in "Slow Horses."  Apple TV+ photo via IMDb.com Picture Britain's greatest secret agent reimagined, not as James Bond but as a flatulent, foul-mouthed, whiskey-swilling slob under a lion's mane of unwashed hair in holey socks always propped among the cigarette butts on his desk. Meet Jackson Lamb. After spending a couple of weeks bingeing through four and a half seasons of “Slow Horses,” I find I've become a fanboy. I may have come to the party late, but I'm hardly alone in my fondness for Apple TV's brilliantly written, white-knuckle exciting, nauseatingly violent and genius-level hilarious spy thriller that gets a bunch of nominations whenever they hand out television awards. As magnificently portrayed by Gary Oldman, Jackson Lamb actually sleeps in his permanently wrinkled shirt and tie on a dingy sofa in his dingy office. Whether asleep or awake – sometimes it's hard to tell – he farts a lot. Hy...

  Leonardo DiCaprio in “One Battle After Another.”   Warner Bros. Pictures photo via IMDb.com A few months after the provocative “Eddington” tried to find black humor in America's slippery slide toward fascism, iconic writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson mines the same sardonic vein in the action-packed “One Battle After Another.” Leonard DiCaprio stretches his Oscar-winning versatility into Cheech and Chong mode to play the film's antihero, Bob, who, it should be noted, goes through most of the film's nonstop chases, shootouts and road rages wearing a bathrobe.  Sixteen years earlier, his name was “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun. He and his honey, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), were political revolutionaries. Not the horned boogeymen we hear about in White House press briefings, but the real kind. Anti-capitalistic warriors, armed to the teeth with explosives and big honkin' machine guns. They liberated migrants from heavily guarded immigration holding facilities. They r...

Zooey (Ji-young Yoo), Rumi (Arden Cho) and Mira (May Hong) are KPop Demon Hunters. Netflix photo via IMDb.com  Bet you never expected to find a glowing review of something called “KPop Demon Hunters” in this space. Me neither. But if you've got preteen kids or grandkids, you get it. Or, if you noticed last weekend's box office numbers, or music charts, or show-biz news that this animated PG-rated Korean musical is the most successful project Netflix has ever produced, your interest might be piqued, too. I have our grandson Niko, now 11, to thank for already knowing a bit about demons in various Asian cultures and the intrepid young warriors – often barely more than children – who fight them. My filmmaking buddy Tom Vendetti has climbed some of the highest mountains in the Himalayas to shoot Buddhist monasteries celebrating colorful multi-day festivals depicting monks locked in eternal battle against the demons of illusion. Same song, different verse. Under his soccer-playing, g...

  Liam Neeson in action in “The Naked Gun.  Paramount Pictures photo via IMDb.com One afternoon in 1980 when I was the entertainment reporter at the Santa Cruz Sentinel, a man appeared at the front counter in the newsroom. He was in his 30s, and reminded me a little of the Fonz. He was, if I recall, wearing a bowling shirt. His name was Jim Abrahams. Co-writing and directing with brothers David and Jerry Zucker, he had just made a movie, and was making a cold call at the newspaper trying to drum up publicity for it. The movie was called “Airplane!” As screen comedies go, it was destined to be a game changer. The trio of filmmakers, soon to be known as ZAZ, had a simple formula for getting big laughs: Make everything a parody of itself. And the silliest thing of all is seriousness. I read that Jim Abrahams died last year at age 80 of complications from leukemia. The ZAZ brand of comedy died a long time before that. Case in point: the Liam Neeson reboot of 1988's detective spoof...