The Los Angeles-based Film Maudit 2.0 began on January 12th and suddenly refuses to end until February 12th. I’m sorry. Some good things just can’t be stopped. If you try, it might run until February 13th. Now, for those of you not on the West Coast who can’t get your…

It’s hard being a Jew nowadays. “When was it ever easy?” you might ask. “But in New York City?” Yup, not for all the shekels in Tel Aviv would I now enter a subway car with a yarmulke on my head. I wouldn’t even sport a tallit outside Bloomingdale’s. This…

Where’s Peter Sellers when you need him? “Passed away,” you say? Oh, that’s a shame. “Why?” you ask. Clearly . . . indubitably. . . without a doubt, his Inspector Jacques Clouseau could have salvaged what’s wound up on the screen as Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Try…

“Pigeons in the grass alas.” — Gertrude Stein The theatergoers in their damp black jackets and overcoats with their black, automatic open-and-close umbrellas in hand were grouping in twos and threes on the second-floor lobby of LaMaMa on East 4th Street. Not a red or yellow in sight, not even on a scarf or beanie. Admittedly, some blue…

Just before I started writing this review, nearly a month ago, the exceedingly nice folks at Disney — and they are quite nice — gently requested that critics invited to advance screenings of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever “refrain from revealing spoilers, cameos, character developments and detailed story points in your…

Award season has already begun, and online links to the studios’ Oscar hopefuls, along with special screenings, are flooding film critics nationwide. So with positive expectations, I opened an email and sat down in front of my 27-inch computer screen to view Jordan Peele’s Nope…

“You do not dismiss love in the way you dismiss your hairdresser.” “I had to see him. We had to talk. You do not dismiss love in the way you dismiss your hairdresser,” the poet Louise Colet was incited to say after being cold-shouldered by her lover, Gustav Flaubert. Maybe Madame Bovary’s author was channeling Colet when he had his adulterous heroine…

The Dutch horror film The Human Centipede (2009) and the current season of The Boys on Amazon Prime have put the spotlight on that body part that most of us are more comfortable keeping hidden. …

“Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory that we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult,” begins Michel Houellbecq’s 2001 novel Platform. While that comment is clearly being applied to the whole of humanity by the renowned French misanthrope, it seems…