The View From The Mountain

Actress Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of musician/actor Lenny Kravitz, is best known for her roles in films like Mad Max Fury Road , Rough Night , and as a very memorable Catwoman in The Batman (she was superb in that film). She made her directorial debut (as well as co-written the script and co-produced) with Blink Twice (Amazon/MGM), a psychological thriller about a cocktail waitress named Frida (Naomi Ackie) who’s busy working an exclusive event with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) when the guy who’s running it, billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) invites them to party with him on his private island for a few days. Of course, the women take him up on his offer, looking forward to treating themselves to a wonderful vacation on a tropical island. However, Frida quickly notices some strange things happening, like one of the maids, who keeps laughingly referring to her as “red rabbit.” Jess also realizes that she’s suffering from memory lapses. But most of this is pa...

I was a huge fan of Jenna Coleman when she played Clara Osborn, the companion to the eleventh and twelfth Doctor Who (played by Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, respectively). Doctor Who, a sort of mad magician who literally travels through space and time, can be an intimidating character, but Coleman more than held her own, plying an engaging performance that was self-assured without being too arrogant. Her time on the program, stretched across the better episodes of two of the Doctors, was extremely memorable for me. So when I heard that Coleman was starring in Wilderness, a mini-series for the Amazon Prime streaming service, I was more than happy to give it a shot. Of course, I waited until all of the episodes were up. I hate the trend with some streamers reverting to the old ’one episode per week’ tactic; I’d rather binge-watch the whole thing over a day or two, which was easy to do with Wilderness, seeing how it only had six episodes, overall. But the fi...

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood , Quentin Tarantino’s ninth (and, according to him, his second to last film) is a really groovy trip through the Hollywood of 1969. Starring Leonardo Decaprio as Rick Dalton, a fading TV star who’s desperate to keep his career going, and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, his friend and stuntman, whose career is also circling the drain. Rick was the star of a popular western TV show before it got cancelled, and now he’s doing guest starring parts on other TV shows--which Rick thinks is beneath him. Even meeting with a movie producer (Al Pacino), who wants him to star in Italian-made westerns, drives Rick into further despair. Decaprio does a great job in creating this worry wart who’s constantly obsessing--as well as whining and crying--over whether he’s doing the right thing every waking moment. In sharp contrast is Pitt’s cool as a cucumber Cliff, a rough and tumble type who just lives for the moment (and who may have murdered his wife). But while Cliff may be...