Malik’s Movie Reviews Past & Present
Warner Brothers, you sneaky studio… When the world is more in a mood for a silly Dark Knight, we get the silliest of them all. ‘Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders’ is the latest animated film from WB Animation, and it’s a homerun (for what it is). Reuniting Adam West and Burt Ward as […]
The fantastic hypothetical, ‘What would you do if you had to kill your spouse as a matter of national security?’ is the basis of Allied, the new Robert Zemeckis film that opened this week. Two of the world’s beautiful people, Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, star as the potentially doomed couple in a film that right […]
Woo… The movie adaptation of August Wilson’s ‘Fences’ is fantastic. Debatably the most well known play in the ten play cycle, Denzel directs the film version with virtually the entire cast in tact from the Broadway version that won him a Tony. ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ came to mind a lot while I watched […]
Gordon: “I never cared who you were.” The Batman: “And you were right.” Gordon: “But shouldn’t the people know who saved them?” The Batman: “A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy’s shoulders to let him know the world hadn’t […]
Here’s another ‘must see’ if it’s somehow slipped through the cracks (as it had for me until this weekend…) ‘The Central Park Five’ is another great documentary by Ken Burns. This one focuses on the case of the five black and brown teenagers in New York City who were tried and convicted of assaulting […]
I want to stay away from the obvious cliches when I judge this film on its own and within the long view of Ava Duvernay’s career (‘this is an important film’), so I’ll try to find the right words at the end… The conceit of this documentary is that while the 13th Amendment abolished […]
I’m late to the party on this one, but finally had time to watch ‘The Resurrection of Jake the Snake’. There are a few documentaries about wrestlers that are legitimately great; this deserves to be added to the list. Centered around one of the most charismatic pro wrestlers of the 80s, this doc really […]
You know how sometimes, something can feel too good to be true, so you underplay your hopes for it? When I first heard David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong’o were doing a movie directed by Mira Nair about the true story of the young girl from Uganda who became a chess champion, I muted my […]
Maybe my most memorable L.A. birthday was at Kate Mandellini’s. Probably would have been the regular spot if it still existed. Anyway, pretty much everyone I know was pissed we didn’t get to be in attendance at the ‘Heat’ screening they had at the Academy. DeNiro, Pacino, Michael Mann, with a Q&A moderated by […]
‘Hell or High Water’…not on my radar to be honest, but had time for it over the holiday weekend, and it’s a nice, small film. The Cops vs. Robbers elements will draw natural comparisons to ‘Heat’ and especially ‘No Country for Old Men’; in both cases that would be unfair to this movie. Different scope, […]
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