Apple TV+
STREAMING REVIEW | 'DISCLAIMER'
After enjoying a fruitful partnership with Netflix on 2018’s “Roma,” Alfonso Cuarón has doubled down on streaming with a whopping 7-episode miniseries, “Disclaimer,” for rival Apple TV+. It’s of the caliber we’ve come to expect from the Oscar winner’s films. He doesn’t let quality suffer because of quantity here. The series, screening at the Venice Film Festival, more than holds its own against other buzzy world premieres.
MOVIE REVIEW
Hugo (2011)
Jaap Buitendijk/Paramount Pictures
One would expect any hardcore Scorsese fan to greet “Hugo” with some measure of trepidation: Has Martin Scorsese finally lost it? Could this PG-rated 3-D fantasy-adventure in fact be his equivalent of Francis Ford Coppola’s Robin Williams-Jennifer Lopez flick, “Jack”? Happily, such is not the case. In essence, “Hugo” the family-friendly extravaganza is only a pretext for Mr. Scorsese’s big-budget love letter to Georges Méliès and for his propaganda film championing moving-image archiving and preservation. You can pretty much tell the auteur was sleepwalking through all the C.G.I.-laden set pieces. But when the movie ventures into his passion-project territories, it comes more alive than any 3-D gimmickry.
MOVIE REVIEW
Brüno (2009)
Mark Schwartzbard/Universal Pictures
“Brüno” pushes the boundaries of good taste by taking the ribald skits Sacha Baron Cohen performed as the character on “Da Ali G Show” and supersizing them for the big screen. It fulfills that base function in the same fashion as “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” with each scene structured around the comic shock value of the star pushing the limits of taste and sanity. Yet, those individual set pieces lack the cohesive, nasty satiric sensibility that characterized the fictional Kazakh journalist’s jaunt through Americana hell.
MOVIE REVIEW
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
DreamWorks Animation
Since "Bambi" – back at the beginning of animated features – animal-centric storylines have often tended to dart around that tenuous intersection of man and wild. From the invisible hunters in Disney’s original to the more recent (yet still obscured) sport fisherman in "Finding Nemo" and commercial fishers in "Happy Feet," these films largely revolve around the tension between the unfettered animal kingdom and the human civilization that lies at its perimeters. The total inversion of this structure is a large part of the first "Madagascar" movie’s success: Rather than a story having to do with humans encroaching on animal territory, here was a film that placed the animals smack in the middle of the human world from the beginning. What’s more – they liked it like that.
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