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Locke

Locke's poster suggests speed. In fact, the BMW Locke drives down Britain's M6 motorway never goes above 60 mph. The movements here are all inside Locke's mind. Wonderful. Watching Locke you get the feeling the film was written and directed by a twenty five year old upstart. A kid , really, more interested in innovation than emotion. I looked up the writer/director. He is 56 year old Steven Knight, a Brit, and with a string of screenwriting credits behind him. So...that was my first misconception. The second one actually took place before I saw the film. I had read that the entire film took place inside a moving car, the camera trained on Mr. Hardy, and that was pretty much it. How, I wondered, could this possibly be anything more than an interesting, meandering, but ultimately failed experiment? As I say, that was my second misconception. The landscape of Tom Hardy's face in Locke registers a gamut of feelings. It's as much of a canvas as the surrounding l...
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The End of the Tour

Great poster! Beautiful concept. The image tells us everything we'd want to know about the film. Especially gutsy is the decision to exclude Jesse Eisenberg's and Jason Segel's faces.  It's called a  two-hander . In the theatre it connotes a play with only two actors. hink  Driving Miss Daisy  or most plays by Samuel Beckett. In  The End of the Tour , Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg and director James Ponsoldt take the two hander into movie land, albeit with a supporting cast (including a hilarious comedic acting turn courtesy of Joan Cusack) and make it into a genuine, moving, funny, and heart-wrenching bit of cinema.  The celebrity writer and his admirer. Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel.  We may never know who David Foster Wallace really was. Already his estate is disowning this film - but the truth about that is also  up for grabs. All we have is the film, exhibit A (if you will), and what we read about it, along with Mr. Wallace'...
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BY ORDER OF THE PEAKY BLINDERS

The Peaky Blinders were a criminal gang based in Birmingham, England during the late 19th century and, to a lesser extent, in the early 20th. Allow me to impose a break from the insane reality of American electoral politics and invite you to take a fictitious trip back to Birmingham, England, 1919. The obvious heir to Coppola's Godfather epic, with a dash of DePalma's Scarface, mixed together with Soprano-style family values gone hopelessly and blissfully wrong, Peaky Blinders is easily one of the most entertaining, well crafted, expertly written long form series I've seen in a very long time! I'd forgotten there was a genre called "epic gangster family saga" - yet here it is, the brainchild of writer/director Steven Knight (Locke, Dirty Pretty Things, and - yes - the creator of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but that's another story - 'Millionaire was his day job until the high end work took over).  Playing the sociopathic...
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