The key to watching and enjoying Ben Lewin’s The Catcher Was a Spy—a dramatization of Nicholas Dawidoff’s non-fiction biography of the same name on Moe Berg, Jewish polymath, major league baseball player, and undercover World War Two O.S.S. agent—is realizing…
Movie Review: Morgan
Morgan is director Luke Scott’s debut feature, and it certainly feels like it. The film’s first twenty minutes provide an intriguing set up: Kate Mara’s corporate fixer Lee Weathers is dispatched to a secluded location in the middle of the…
Movie Review: The Phenom — Trauma and healing on the baseball diamond
Usually films revolving around patient-psychiatrist relationships climax with a shouting match. The patient, weary enough to let their emotional guard down, lashes out. Sometimes it’s toward the psychiatrist. Sometimes it’s toward themselves. And like a fencer spotting an opening, the…
2016 Tribeca Film Festival: The Phenom
The 2016 Tribeca Film Festival saw its fair share of first time filmmakers as well as returning and well experienced actors and directors. In an eclectic ensemble of actors, writers and directors, The Phenom stars Ethan Hawke and Paul Giamatti…
The Film Canon: Sideways (2004)
The biggest compliment I can give Sideways is that it is unconventional. Reading the plot description, it may sound like a typical road trip movie centered around two middle-aged men. That premise is still the basis of the film, but…
TV Review: ‘Billions’ 1×02 “Naming Rights”
To catch up on the premiere episode, check out my previous Billions coverage here. Mild spoilers ahead! While the pilot episode of Showtime’s newest addition simmered with kinetic energy and allowed us a peek into its true potential, this week’s episode…
TV Review: ‘Billions’ Series Premiere
The opening scene of Showtime’s Billions was unexpected, to say the very least. Emmy Award-winning actor Paul Giamatti is bound in rope BDSM-style, a dominatrix in a sharp-heeled leather boot stamps a cigarette out in his burly tuft of chest hair…