The Invisible Guest (2016) (Spanish: Contratiempo) is a 2016 Spanish crime thriller by director and writer Oriol Paulo. The intricate plot will leave the viewer spellbound .
Adrián Doria, a successful business entrepreneur, husband and father, is knocked unconscious, and wakes up in a locked hotel room to find the dead body of Laura...
“Colette”–A Woman Ahead of Her Time
Guest reviewer: Barbara Donsky, author of the memoir, Veronica’s Grave
“Colette,” opens in the countryside of rural France as we meet the young Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley) at home in Burgundy. In short order, a successful Parisian writer known as “Willy” (Dominic West) pays a visit to...
“The Wife”–The Invisible Woman, or…Stand by My Man
The Wife, based upon Meg Wolitzer’s bestselling novel by the same name, opens with a sixty-something affluent couple, Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) and her husband, Joe (Jonathan Pryce), waiting for the phone to ring in the middle of the night. A perhaps futile hope that the Nobel Prize committee will grant Joe his dream of a...
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a Netflix historical drama based on the 2008 historical best-selling novel of the same name by Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Set on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel, a year after the end of the Second World War, we see Julie Ashton (the talented Lily James –Lady...
“BlacKkKlansman”: Part of the American Fabric?
A Spike Lee film about white supremacy, BlacKkKlansman is based on Ron Stallworth’s 2006 memoir, which eviscerates the hideous social structures of racism in the US.
In 1979 Stallworth (played by newcomer, John David Washington, son of Denzel Washington) becomes the first black detective in Colorado Springs’s police...
The Devil’s Backbone–Peter Pan meets “The Shape of Water”
The Devil’s Backbone (2001) (Spanish: El espinazo del diablo), directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, was independently produced by Pedro Almodóvar and foreshadows his Academy Award winning “The Shape of Water” (see my March 19, 2018 review).
Set in 1939 during the final year of the Spanish Civil War, we see in the...
