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David Frankel’s THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 is the extremely slick sequel about life in a high fashion magazine. Meryl Streep again plays the imperious editor and Anne Hathaway her foil. The script traffics in changes in publishing and how social media has affected it. With most of the original cast back everyone with predictable story arcs. There is some dried eyed sentiment here and there. All...

Angus MacLachlan’s A LITTLE PRAYER is a lovely little gem about the complicated relationships in a southern family. The authenticity of the accents and behaviors are small miracles when characters from below the Mason-Dixon Line are so often portrayed as cliches with bad accents painful to the ear. Strong cast with David Strathairn as a protector of his daughter in law (Jane Levy) when he discov...

Jacques Tati’s 1967 PLAYTIME is an elaborate plotless comedy stressing the inhuman quality of modern architecture. Shot in 70mm on huge sets which were essentially a small city the director appears as his famous character Monsieur Hulot. Tati’s perfectionism and bad luck caused the film to take 3 years to shoot. Tati insisted on only showing the film in 70mm with a complex stereophonic soundtra...

Brian DePalma’s 1970 HI MOM follows a Viet Nam vet (a very young Robert DeNiro) who gets involved with filmmaking and revolutionary theater. At the time this was seen as a brilliant satire but it now just seems tedious. Many of the scenes appear improvised and go on too long. There is an endless sequence shot in black and white and hand held of a confrontational black theatre group assaulting a...

In Steven Soderbergh’s THE CHRISTOPHERS the children of a once famous artist hire a forger to complete some unfinished, long ago abandoned canvases so they'll have an inheritance when he dies. Michaela Coel plays the forger and Ian McKellen the artist and the film is basically a dialog between the two. Both give marvelous performances. Set mostly in the artist’s rambling messy house this environ...