Such is Spielberg’s draw that even film lovers with little interest in dystopia or sci-fi hesitate only a couple of days before dutifully making their way to the nearest movie theater. So, does it deserve the praise? Not really. Special CGI-enhanced effects, spectacular as they are, pall after a while and become repetitive although to the end there are lovely surprising images such as the disco scene with the dancing couples floating in an endless colorful vortex.

By now, film adaptations based on the oeuvre of the two most prolific British writers of crime fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, form a respectable body. Of the latter, probably the best-known work remains “Murder on the Orient Express.” Today comes a new version by the, himself now almost venerable, Brit actor, Kenneth Branagh. From the get-go in this iteration, the actor/director makes no attempt to shake the

Do sleeping dogs lie forever? The question can be asked about Peter Landesman’s biopic of Mark Felt, the FBI agent who leaked drop after drop of damning information regarding the Watergate burglary to Bod Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, until they turned into a flood that drowned Nixon and acolytes in 1974. If one relies on the story as it is told here the dogs will indeed not wake. Mark Felt

A quintessential American, a great actor, major playwright and poet, Sam Shepard is one of those human beings whose very presence uplifts and makes the world a better place.

Shepard was a playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director. He wrote no fewer than forty-four plays and various books (short stories, novels and memoirs). In 1979 he received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

I know, I know, you’re jaded. You’ve seen it all in hundreds, nay, thousands of movies. War movies, survival movies, hanging-on-by-the skin-of-your-teeth movies, abandon-hope movies, never-lose-hope movies. You’ve also seen admirable or despicable actions from soldiers, officers, and ordinary civilians. But trust me, you have never seen all of that brought together in a package such as Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk.”

Can we fight evil? Save our lovely planet from ghouls such as Monsanto and other purveyors of various poisons into GMO plants and animals? Can the good people win? Can we save the human race while preventing our animals from being seen only in terms of sirloin or chops? Such is the theme of “Okja,” a Netlix film streaming on the video channel (and causing much distress at the recent Cannes film festival when the jury president

Some one hundred thirty years after her death in the house in Amherst, Pennsylvania where she lived as a recluse dressed in white and scribbling poetry in the middle of the night, do we know more about Emily Dickinson than her ever-puzzled circle did? Books about her would make a hefty library, scholars who have spent a lifetime researching her would fill a mid-size conference room, her own poetry, some two thousand