People walk all over Jesus, partially because he can’t fight back, partially because he lets them. His best friend is a prostitute who shakes him down for money and hogs his measly apartment to service clients. People have an uncanny ability to not notice him when he walks in a room—unless they need him for something, of course. The gay, femmy son of a famous ex-boxer, Jesus makes ends meet turning the occasional trick and fixing the wigs of Havana transvestites

The praise critics have showered on Todd Haynes’s CAROL gives me pause. Have I seen an entirely different film or is there something in this one that escapes me? A. O. Scott of the N.Y. Times sees CAROL as “fetishistically precise in its recreation of the look and sound of the past.” Sorry, but the fingernails with their bright red polish, the lips with their bright red lipstick, the precisely-coiffed heads, women wearing high heels

Of course, the historical Hugh Glass, legendary nineteenth-century frontiersman left for dead by his fellows after surviving a horrific grizzly bear attack, never had a half-Native American son. But neither did he violently confront the traitor who left him for dead and murdered the aforementioned imagined son. It’s also improbable that during his journey he was rescued and aided by a lone Pawnee elder. We know this because we have authentic

There is a moment in Paolo Sorrentino’s YOUTH when the aging conductor and composer, played by Michael Caine, stops in a beautiful European meadow to watch the cows. At first we are listening to each dong of a cowbell as a separate sound. Slowly he begins to hear the music hidden inside them. With a bit of imagination, the conductor soon raises a hand to conduct. If the film has a metaphor, this is it. It takes every random "dong" and connects them into a symphony. When not conducting cows, the conductor has retreated to a luxury spa-hotel that might be Purgatory.

The Cold War, which provides the historical context for Steven Spielberg's new film BRIDGE OF SPIES, is one of modern history's more stupid phases (BRIDGE OF SPIES is based on real historical events), a Thanksgiving Day parade of hypocrites high on reefer-madness paranoia about the other guy. That era gave us doctrines, an arms race, the constant threat of mutually-assured destruction and a movie franchise

The storyline of "MacBeth" can be resumed to the following: Macbeth is a man obsessed by ambition. Done!

Scotland is in the throes of civil war, the background goes, and the survival of King Duncan's reign depends on one last battle with the loyal Macbeth commanding his troops [DID YOU KNOW? There are 420 different screen adaptations of the works of Shakespeare, including ones made by Akira Kurosawa and Roman Polanski.]

In 1974 Philipe Petit, the French wirewalker, attempted and achieved the impossible. How often can a human being say that? Yes, people are capable of extraordinary feats, yes, there are always more difficult tasks to complete, races to win, higher summits to conquer, new worlds to discover, unknown chasms to explore, masterpieces to create but… I would venture to say that this man truly did the impossible, the equivalent of which no one