by Alexander C. Kafka Tick, Tick . . . Boom! is a lively, lovely tribute by one singular Broadway talent, Lin-Manuel Miranda, to another, Jonathan Larson. It also marks Miranda’s impressive debut as a film director.  Not to get all sappy or anything, but beyond its superb casting and production standards, the movie brims with…

by Alexander C. Kafka The Last Duel is a compelling wide-screen-worthy medieval period drama with exemplary production values — all the more admirable given its disrupted filming schedule during the pandemic. But the project is also a fascinating psycho-cultural phenomenon: a primarily male-helmed Me Too-era exercise in brutal masculine mutual and self-punishment.  The true tale…

by Alexander C. Kafka Is loneliness a choice? Is love? Such timeless questions resonate particularly a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic as we continue to weigh the risks and rewards of companionship, of intimacy, and calculate our capacity for solitude. Those quandaries propel the bittersweet romantic, sometimes droll meditation I’m Your Man,…

by Alexander C. Kafka During the pandemic, my family binge-watched the National Geographic Genius miniseries about Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. We imagined ourselves the producers for such a project and considered whom we would select as geniuses to feature. On my short list would surely be the choreographer, dancer, and entrepreneur Alvin…

by Alexander C. Kafka A shy high-school student asks a girl out. Desperate for some wheels, he buys a sorry ’65 Chrysler sedan and, with it, a heap of trouble.  That’s not a bad premise for a noir action comedy, but the new release First Date squanders the concept from script through edit in a…

by Alexander C. Kafka A lyrical disaster movie? That sounds like a contradiction in terms, yet the Swedish collective Crazy Films delivered just that in 2018 with The Unthinkable, and it is arriving on American platforms this month. The picture is a hybrid of Swedish family drama and low-budget but well-executed calamity, as though a…

by Alexander C. Kafka “My first experience home-brewing was before it was legal,” says Jim Koch, cofounder and chairman of Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams. “I did it with my dad. He brought home some yeast … then he brought home some hops, and we made a beer. And I thought it was…

by Alexander C. Kafka Covid has killed two and a half million people worldwide. A conspiracy-embracing, white-supremacist, fascist cohort of Americans are represented by opportunistic enablers in Congress. Texas diverts attention from its fatal mishandling of a winter storm by prematurely and irresponsibly declaring the end of the pandemic. And after a year, we’re all…

by Alexander C. Kafka The disappointing new film Bliss is maddening in ways both intended and surely unintended. A heady rumination on the nature of reality featuring two bright stars in quirky character roles was an attractive proposition, but it doesn’t pan out. The film sometimes conveys a real sense of dissociation. The script could…

by Alexander C. Kafka Can the moon strike twice? Sadly, no. The question hovers over John Patrick Shanley’s new film Wild Mountain Thyme because it aims for the same sort of bittersweet heartache seasoned with gritty and eccentric comedic beats that characterized his Oscar-winning script for Moonstruck (1987). The grit then was of the Brooklyn Heights…

by Alexander C. Kafka What is it about Frank Zappa’s eyes? They leer. They challenge. They invite play and fun and nonsense. But they’re also afraid. They don’t look away. They fix on you defiantly as if he’s expecting to be slapped for something naughty that he said. And he said many naughty things.  One…

by Alexander C. Kafka David Byrne’s artistry has always had a living-room intimacy, reflected in the delightful cover photos of the 1982 double-live album The Name of This Band Is the Talking Heads. In the midst of a pandemic, inviting him into our space — or being invited into his — is exactly the therapy…

by Alexander C. Kafka The Canadian Cronenbergs are body-horror royalty, and while father David has veered toward more straightforward dramatic fare, his earlier career is echoed uncannily by son Brandon.  No one should screen a Cronenberg film expecting to be merely entertained but rather provoked, intrigued, seduced, disgusted, and possibly outraged, occasionally all at the…

by Alexander C. Kafka What do you get when you combine unrelenting nihilism with art-school swagger? The Antenna, the first feature film of Turkish writer-director Orçun Behram, a 2011 graduate of Columbia College Chicago who until now has worked on music videos, short films, and documentaries. Ihsan Önal plays a heavy lidded, bug-eyed building superintendent…

by Alexander C. Kafka “The forest is deep. It’s easy for those unfamiliar with its ways to find themselves lost.” So says a beguiling young woman, Danae (Anastasia Rafaella Konidi), who lives in a tumble-down cabin in the woods. She says this in caution to Panos (Prometheus Aleifer), a doctor who has just moved to…

by Alexander C. Kafka The French scientist Pierre Curie, in the new film Radioactive, is impressed by a colleague’s paper on the magnetic properties of steel. It’s an apt reflection of his attraction to that steely colleague herself, the Polish-born Maria Sklodowska. They become labmates, chisel through four tons of rock pitch over four years,…

by Alexander C. Kafka John Lewis: Good Trouble couldn’t be more timely.  The new documentary, which will be available Friday on demand, arrives amid Black Lives Matter protests and renewed and deepening threats to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It shows one of the architects and key drivers of that legislation, the longtime civil-rights…