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THE PHOTOGRAPH
Mae Morton (Issa Rae) is a museum curator grappling with the death of her estranged mother, a famed photographer who leaves her daughter a letter explaining her journey. The letter leaves Mae unsure of how to proceed, until she connects with journalist Michael Block (Lakeith Stanfield), who is working on his own story about Mae’s mom. The story travels back and forth from present to past in a languorous mode, this is a film, not a movie. The film’s coloring takes on rich neutral tones, which allow the viewer to settle into a touching tale of love – between mother and daughter, romantic love, new love and being in love…
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Queen & Slim
by Le Anne Lindsay, Editor Lena Waithe (Boomerang (TV Series) wrote this movie from a suggestion by “A Million Little Pieces” author James Frey. She explains as black people we have to make a decision on who we show up as in life – Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. I think that’s a bit overstated as it doesn’t leave any gray area, or should I say, medium brown 😉 but in terms of character creation I see her point. Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) is a hard driving, cynical defense attorney. Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) is an easygoing, religious Costco employee. They meet on Tinder. She’d swiped left on him before, but…
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US (Jordan Peele)
US starts with a creepy prologue set in a Santa Cruz amusement park in 1986 where a little girl wanders off from her parents to go inside a mirrored funhouse called “Find Yourself”. What she sees there haunts this young girl for some time, even to some extent into her adulthood where she’s now an accomplished woman with a jovial husband, typical teenage daughter and young son with a penchant for masks. It’s unclear why the family is vacationing in Santa Cruz, there seems to be reference to the husband having stayed at this house when he was a kid, like the house belongs to his family; but as this…
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GLASS
I was on Rotten Tomatoes reading some horrifically mean reviews of M. Night Shyamalan’s sequel to UNBREAKABLE & SPLIT – all complete with horrible puns on cracked glass and glasses half full etc… Okay even as a huge Philly film supporter, I’m not going to say I have enjoyed all of Night’s movies, or that I’ve even seen them all; but I can’t understand why movie critics really get off on tearing him down, they want to hate his movies. Many of them that will admit Unbreakable and Split were both pretty good, seem to do so reluctantly. I can’t think of another filmmaker who gets such vitriolic treatment from…
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Phantom Thread
The film takes place in 1950’s London and is about a very fussy fashion designer named Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, (who claims this is his final movie role, we’ll see about that). Woodcock is a genius at his craft, but he’s also full of himself, and seems to suffer from OCD and HSP (highly sensitive person) which is really a thing. He can’t stand noises, even stuff like people chewing. Everything must be routine. He has to be told about certain matters only at certain carefully chosen moments or he goes off...
