Author Archives: Eleanor Ringel Cater

“The Trial of the Chicago 7,” Aaron Sorkin’s cracklingly good Netflix movie about what happened in Judge Julius Hoffman’s (Frank Langella) courtroom.

The year is 1968. Records are still records and landlines are still called telephones. Stonewall is a year away and the specter of AIDS lurks in a distant decade.

“The Glorias,” Julie Taymor’s take on the life and times of Gloria Steinem, is so muddled and off-putting that I’m going to cancel my subscription to Ms.magazine.

“Made in Italy” looks like a real movie. But like a cheap knock-off of a trendy gadget, it might as well be tagged “Made in Japan.”

In some ways, “Feels Good Man” is much ado about not much.

Never mind being John Malkovich. Try being Charlie Kaufman.

It would probably take Kaufman himself to pull that off, though there are those who’d say he’s already done it. That his movies, from “Adaptation” to “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” to, well, “Being John Malkovich” are about being Charlie Kaufman.

Not since I heard about Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams, have I been as stunned by an actor’s death as I was about Chadwick Boseman’s.

Everything interesting about “Tesla” is on the edges. 

Like the macabre modern touches (Industrialist J.P. Morgan’s daughter, the movie’s narrator/potential love interest, coolly googles Tesla and his rival inventor, Edison, noting the latter has more than twice as many entries). 

The glowing green vial Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie keeps next to her bed isn’t the most radiant thing in “Radioactive.” That honor must go to Rosamund Pike whose spikey performance as Curie lights up what could’ve lapsed into another feminist-laced by-the-book biography.

“Palm Springs” may be the perfect pandemic romance. An initial at-a-glance plot summary is admittedly off-putting, especially for those of us who think “Groundhog Day” may be one of the greatest films ever made.

A victory at sea for writer/star Tom Hanks, his entire cast and crew and us – their lucky audience, “Greyhound” gives moviegoers a gripping taste of the World War II combat zone known as the Battle of the Atlantic.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater Though most outside fireworks were curtailed this Fourth, there were plenty of them inside on your streaming devices. “Hamilton” (or “Hamilfilm,” as its been nicknamed) hit homes like a combination Sparkler, Cherry Bomb, and Roman Candle. Equally potent, in a very different way and arriving with considerably less fanfare, was the […]

Oh, how we’ve missed you Jon Stewart.

Thankfully, he’s back with “Irresistible,” a cheerfully subversive bit of political satire that’s almost impossible to write about without giving the game away.

A world-famous and quite wealthy mystery writer named Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) has been found dead. Apparently, it’s a suicide. His throat has been slit. His hand is on the bloody knife.