Norman Lloyd, the actor-writer-director-producer who worked with some of the most notable names in Hollywood history, and is best-known for co-starring on the acclaimed TV drama “St. Elsewhere,” passed away yesterday at the age of 106. Yes, that 106 is certainly an attention-getting number, but even it doesn’t fully encompass just how far back Lloyd’s work…

Alexandre Aja makes a very different kind of confined spaces thriller to follow up his great “Crawl” in this week’s also-great “Oxygen,” premiering today on Netflix. It may have been in development before the world knew anything about COVID-19 (and once had Anne Hathaway attached), but this truly feels like the most ‘pandemic thriller’ yet…

“The last film festival.” This was how my friends and I casually joked about last year’s True/False, which took place in early March, right around the time when the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up to become the global nightmare of a generation. On the second day of the festival, Austin mayor Steve Adler announced the…

I was fairly surprised, shocked even, when I first learned that women or even female rodents were rarely used in the past for studies in health, even when researching the safety and efficacy of products for women like birth control pills. I discovered that anomaly when I became a member of a women’s group called Access Circles,…

“What Lies West,” a gentle drama about the budding friendship between a recent college graduate and a 16-year-old, is an original story by debut writer/director Jessica Ellis. But it feels like an adaptation, particularly of the sorts of very popular books about growing up in the suburbs that kids used to read in the late 20th century…

A seemingly happy couple is living in a borrowed villa near St. Tropez—smoking cigarettes, making love, and languidly paddling around the deep topaz-blue swimming pool of the title. It’s a sun-drenched idyll until another man, ostensibly an old friend of them both, shows up with his beautiful 18-year-old daughter. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, old…