Bohemian Rhapsody tells the story of Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury.  We follow Freddie all the way from when he was a nobody, working at an airport hauling luggage, through Queen’s meteoric rise, and on to his early death of AIDs at age 45.  I’d read a lot about this film la

In Uncut Gems, a fantastic film written and directed by Josh and Benny Safdie (the script was also co-written by Ronald Bronstein), Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jewelry store owner in the Diamond District in New York City.  He is buried in debts, but the fast-talking Howard

Booksmart depicts the last 24 hours of high school for best friends Molly and Amy.  The two girls have worked hard in high school and gotten into good colleges.  But when Molly realizes that the party-loving classmates she always looked down on were also able to get into good colleg

Prospect is a brilliant, low-budget sci-fi film, written and directed by Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell.  When the film begins, a teenaged girl named Cee (Sophie Thatcher) and her father (Jay Duplass) are dropped off on a jungle-filled planet.  Cee’s father is prospecting gems

I was saddened to read of the recent passing of comedy legend Terry Jones.  There are some moving tributes to him up here. This is cool — Uncut Gems was one of my favorite films of 2019, and Adam Sandler and directors Josh & Benny Safdie have already reunited for a short fi

David Mack’s new Star Trek novel, Collateral Damage, looks to me like it might represent the conclusion of an amazing, almost two-decade-long experiment on the part of Pocket Books to create a connected continuity of Star Trek novels. It began in 2001 with the publication of S.D. Pe

Fast Color made my list of my favorite movies of 2019.  It’s a beautiful story of a young woman, Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who has been living on her own for years but who finally returns home to her mother (Lorraine Toussaint) and young daughter.  Ruth is in desperate circumsta