Aarcflick

When she won a Golden Globe for “The Devil Wears Prada,” Meryl Streep was at her best about the role costume design could play in movies, while thanking costume designer Patricia Field: “They were like special effects for our movie.” Indeed, “special effects” is what Pat Field’s effervescent touch brings to any project she signs her name to, the most popular of which is undoubtedly HBO’s “Sex and the City.” With the exception perhaps of “Mad Men,” has there been another culturally iconic television series in the past quarter-century that has influenced, and even evolved, the way people dress in their daily lives? Director: Michael Selditch Stars: Jean Michel Basquiat, Kim Cattrall, Lily Collins So it’s no easy task to do justice to the life and legacy of Field, a colorful New York City personality about whom a book was recently published. (Field doesn’t call it an autobiography, since that word sounds too definitive to her.) But more versed in episodic productions like CNN’s four-part ...

 Two brothers trek across the American West in an attempt to reconcile past traumas and forge a new bond in Sheridan O’Donnell’s deeply moving debut. Jake (Daniel Diemer, Netflix’s The Half Of It) and his brother Pete (Philip Ettinger, A24’s First Reformed) pile into a beat-up van, heading to Albuquerque bound for Seattle. Pete has just attempted suicide for the umpteenth time and his concerned parents (JK Simmons, Spiderman: No Way Home, Whiplash) have enlisted Jake to drive Pete home for a family intervention. Two brothers trek across the American West in an attempt to reconcile past traumas and forge a new bond in Sheridan O’Donnell’s deeply moving debut. Jake (Daniel Diemer, Netflix’s The Half Of It) and his brother Pete (Philip Ettinger, A24’s First Reformed) pile into a beat-up van, headed to Albuquerque bound for Seattle. Pete has just attempted suicide for the umpteenth time and his concerned parents (JK Simmons, Spiderman: No Way Home, Whiplash) have recruited Jake to driv...

 A critic’s job is to provide recommendations to the general public based on a presumed solid knowledge of art forms. These days, some assume that favorable reviews must have been paid for and that brutal critiques indicate a pre-existing vendetta against someone or something.  A story set nearly a century ago, long before the rise of TikTok influencers, it may have a period feel, but it covers many of the same themes. Anand Tucker’s The Critic presents a glamorous portrait of an old-fashioned theater critic and the lengths he’s willing to go to stay relevant. Director: Anand Tucker Writers: Patrick Marber, Anthony Quinn Stars: Gemma Arterton, Ian McKellen, Lesley Manville Ian McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, a revered employee of The Daily Chronicle who has been with the paper for four decades. The death of his editor puts his son, David Brooke (Mark Strong), in charge, and Jimmy is immediately put on notice. Jimmy doesn't like Brooke discrediting an actress he finds charming, a...

Esteemed film critic Roger Ebert once declared that movies are enormous empathy-generating machines, a statement I wholeheartedly embraced and there is no better demonstration of this phenomenon than with How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. The ups and downs of emotions and the rollercoaster of feelings was one hell of a ride! Writer-director Pat Boonnitipat didn’t even try to reinvent the wheel. You know exactly what’s going to happen in the end; there’s no final miracle cure (I’m looking at you, Queen of Tears), there’s no “it’s always darkest before the dawn” ending and there’s no final twist (there is a twist of sorts, but Choo whispered to me what the twist will be an hour before it happened and of course he was right.  How does he do this every time?), but this is a testament to great storytelling in that you don’t need twists and turns, flashy cinematography, full orchestration, a CGI dream sequence or the whole shebang to serve up a delicious plate of feelings. It jus...

Claire Hiller's joy at the miraculous resurrection of her daughter Robin after a fatal accident turns to dread when she notices disturbing changes, fearing that something dark has followed Robin since she is apparently dead.  Robin is a fifteen-year-old with a great talent for the piano, which in the opening we see her playing in a picturesque Roman church, full of people who have come to see her perform. Claire, her mother, is loving and understanding towards her and seems to understand and support her fully. Director: Robert Salerno Writer: Sarah Conradt Stars: Connie Britton, Giovanni Cirfiera, Freya Hannan-Mills Robin has decided to stop talking since childhood, after a tragic car accident in which her sister lost her life. But after a second accident, from which Robin miraculously emerges unharmed, she begins to speak again. Despite Clare's initial enthusiasm, the situation soon takes a disturbing turn: the fifteen-year-old begins to display increasingly sinister behaviors...

 Anyone who came of age during Orlando Bloom’s heyday — when the British actor became a drop-dead gorgeous sex symbol in the early 2000s as the long-haired Legolas in “Lord of the Rings” or the audacious Will Turner in “Pirates of the Caribbean” — will probably be a little shaken by the actor’s 180-degree turn in “The Cut.” A sports drama with traces of body horror running through its veins, director Sean Ellis’s film disfigures Bloom’s pristine face with some prosthetics (done to perfection by makeup designer Mark Coulier) to play a nameless retired Irish boxer desperate for a second chance at stardom. Privately schooled and Katy Perry’s longtime sidekick, Bloom isn’t exactly a natural choice for such an underdog, but the broken nose and droopy eyelids he dons successfully dispel most of his inherent movie-star glamour. And yet, watching the film, there’s something missing from his performance — an inner intensity, a hunger — that convinces as much as all the makeup and deepens th...

 In 2022, Movistar+ presented on its platform the documentary series Locomía, directed by the Jerez native Jorge Laplace, which we found to be a very interesting approach to a musical, but above all sociological, phenomenon that from the late 80s to almost the mid-90s was certainly surprising, the appearance of the musical group of that name, Locomía, although it can also be written Loco Mía, an “electro-pop” group that started from a double circumstance: impossible outfits, halfway between a circus clown and a Picasso-like bullfighter, with gigantic shoulder pads, clothing designed by Xavi Font, the group's ideologist; and the commercial vision of the music producer José Luis Gil (nothing to do with his namesake, the actor and voice actor, famous as Mr. Cuesta from Aquí no hay quien viva), who knew how to see the enormous potential of those boys with ambiguous androgynous aesthetics. In the review of that documentary, which was certainly very good (the documentary, not the review…...

 The worst thing about Netflix’s mysteriously abandoned thriller Rebel Ridge is its abysmally generic title. It sounds like an anonymous action slop starring a lesser-known Hemsworth, and one might expect that, along with a brawn-over-brains trailer and a barely-there PR campaign, it’s another of the streaming platform’s low-impact time-wasters.  But there’s a lot more to chew on here, a full three-course meal appearing on a platform that typically distracts us with snacks, and one of the most damning arguments you can make against a big-name filmmaker associating with them, a film that deserved the most and was somehow hurt by the least. Director: Jeremy Saulnier Writer: Jeremy Saulnier Stars: Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, who came to prominence with Blue Ruin and then the magnificently twisted Green Room, worked with Netflix for his uneven adaptation of Hold the Dark in 2018, a film that at least had a premiere at the Toronto fil...

 If cinema is to be believed as a storyteller, in the mid- to late-19th century you stepped into the vast expanse that is the western part of the United States and almost immediately you were in grave danger. Whether it was from bands of horrendous marauders, business deals gone bad, or police chasing too many slippery bank robbers, finding safe passage from point A to point B proved a tricky procedure, and I won’t even begin to mention a rattlesnake or two.  Historical records can easily lend weight to many of these works of fiction, the latter best seen on screen in the cinematic centerpieces “Lonesome Dove” and “Unforgiven,” and even directly addressing the dangers of the era in “A Million Ways to Die in the West.” Obviously, the same can be said of any genre with roots in reality, but for the sake of this review, focusing on the latest Western installment, “The Thicket,” we’ll keep our attention there. Director: Elliott Lester Writers: Chris Kelley, Joe R. Lansdale Stars: ...

 If you feel like the opening scenes of Continue are testing you to see if you're tough, curious and empathetic enough to keep watching a brutally honest film about a suicidal young woman, you're not alone. There's nothing easy about the loud, bloody and disturbing onslaught of writer-director Nadine Crocker's drama, which was based on her own experiences. There's also nothing casual about the timing of the film's release: September is Suicide Prevention Month. We have Crocker to thank for using her artistic voice to promote awareness and action. Director: Nadine Crocker Writer: Nadine Crocker Stars: Nadine Crocker, Shiloh Fernandez, Lio Tipton It's not like this is a didactic PSA: Continue never strays too far from the kinetic power of the opening, of another shoe dropping. But the intensity works best as a foil to other emotions, and the film is an intricate tapestry of them. Continue centers on Dean (Crocker), who ends up in a treatment center, against hi...

 There are times when I sit and think about what could have been. My life is, like most of our lives, the result of countless stars that mysteriously aligned. One can hope and dream that things will turn out a certain way, but as the poignant chorus of the old song “Que Sera Sera” goes, “whatever has to be, will be”—planning and hoping against all odds, things just happen.  As I left the Metropolitan 4 Theater after seeing Andrea Nevins’ “The Cowboy and the Queen” at the 39th Annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival, it was hard not to laugh at the strange ways the world works. Director: Andrea Blaugrund Nevins Writers: Graham Clark, Andrea Blaugrund Nevins Stars: Queen Elizabeth II, Monty Roberts There are times when I sit and think about what could have been. My life is, like most of our lives, the result of countless stars that mysteriously aligned. One can hope and dream that things will turn out a certain way, but as the poignant refrain of the old song “Que Sera ...

Historians have long debated whether Abraham Lincoln, considered one of the greatest American presidents, had romantic and sexual relationships with men. A new documentary, Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln, concludes that he did. “Our greatest president, our greatest military genius, the man who saved the Union, was also deeply in love, sexually and emotionally, with other men,” says Thomas Balcerski, a professor at Occidental College and Eastern Connecticut State University, in the documentary. “These relationships are not ‘So what?’ — they are defining, because this is an individual who struggled his entire life to make sense of this duality within him.” Director: Shaun Peterson Writers: Joshua Koffman, Grace Leeson, Shaun Peterson Stars: Thomas Balcerski, Michael Bronski, Jack Halberstam Using interviews with historians, documents and re-enactments, Lover of Men examines Lincoln’s relationships with four men: Billy Greene, Joshua Speed, Elmer Ellsworth and David D...