The Lost King (2022) - Movie Review

 

It’s been a while between drinks, but after a five-year gap since his last feature film, British director Stephen Frears is back in the cinema. Between 2015 and 2017, he came out with three films that I quite liked in The Program, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Victoria & Abdul, and as those were also my more formative years of trying to find my own voice as a critical writer, I’ve grown quite fond of the man’s style. And while I can certainly see what I liked back then still present today, there’s also a much more uneasy feeling attached to it this time around.

Stan & Ollie (2019) - Movie Review

Time to take a trip back to the days of black-and-white cinema with a look at one of vaudeville’s most beloved acts: Laurel & Hardy. Vaudeville comedy has had such a tremendous impact not just on comedy but the cinematic medium as a whole that it is quite possible to understate just how important this movement was for the art form. From Charlie Chaplin to the Three Stooges to Abbott & Costello, this field of pantomime performance set a bedrock for pretty much every comedic work that would follow. As such, creating a biopic in tribute to one of these acts requires not only a willingness to respect the greats but also an objective admission of why they are the greats to begin with. And in all of the important ways, this manages to do just that.