Rocketman, Review: Messed-up multi-millionaire music-maestro Film-makers now need to ask themselves whether it makes good sense to churn out bio-pics with regular frequency. Does the genre hold enough promise to deliver quality cinema? In recent times, many of them are guilty of picking eminent personalities from films and music, with common traits, like troubled childhood, inability to handle fame and fortune, sexual mania or alternative sexual behaviour, and drug abuse. The phenomenon is co...

  John Lennon was an iconoclastic symbol of the counterculture, a public figure that rejected conventional social mores, which were complemented by his musical gifts. Whether as an actor or as a pop star Beatle, Lennon was often portrayed as “witty and satirical,” descriptions that he ultimately hated and sought to grow as an artist and human being. This essay traces his filmic life as a way to survey whether his “roles” (fictional or biographical) helped to manif...

Danny Collins, Review: Letter and spirit  Dan Fogelman, in his feature directorial debut, gives ample evidence of a truly fertile imagination that builds an edifice on an apparently flimsy premise. Considering he’s the man who wrote Crazy, Stupid, Love; Tangled and Cars, this should not come as a surprise. After all, a good screenplay means convincing fiction, doesn’t it? Almost anything can trigger a film script: a news item, a book, a biography, a personal experience, or, a...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent   Friday night, July 4th, A Hard Day’s Night, the 50th Anniversary release of The Beatles' seminal adolescent experiment with cinema from 1964, began limited screenings in 100 theaters. It is another US British Invasion of sorts. For the rest of us, the DVD/Blu-Ray reissue hits shelves today, July 6. Director Richard Lester has said in retrospect that George Harrison was “the best actor;” Paul McCartney “tried ...

  It was a slightly surreal experience being in London on Wednesday evening and watching the new documentary film LENNONNYC , an account of famed musician and activist John Lennon’s final ten years in his adopted city of New York. While the London Film Festival crowd was certainly enthusiastic about a film that brought them closer to one of their icons, the barbs from Lennon and his wife and artistic collaborator Yoko Ono were far from flattering about John’s native country. â€...

Wednesday, January 24-----Jared Leto is the thinking man's Orlando Bloom. Possessed of a handsome face, a lithe body, piercingly deep eyes and an infectious smile, Leto is one of the few in Young Hollywood who shows no vanity in his screen performances. This is more than evidenced in his starring role as the chubby and erratic Mark David Chapman, the young man who, on a cold December night in 1980 in New York City, pointed his gun at music legend John Lennon and robbed the world of a man know...