by Quendrith Johnson Los Angeles Correspondent Just when you had forgotten all about Ernest Hemingway? Nobody forgets this author, not for long anyway. At least he has not yet become a victim of cancel culture. Yet Hemingway's last novel "Across the River and Into the Trees" in 1950, from Charles Scribner & Sons in New York, was actually panned in some places by reviewers who felt perhaps it might be interpreted as a 'parody' of the spare, simple declaractive se...

Spiderman, Into the Spider-verse: Spiderman is dead; long live Spidermen “I love you” yells PDNY cop Jefferson Davis, to his son Miles, as he drops him off to school. After a few seconds, he insists that Miles yell back, “You gotta say I love you back.” Miles, the would-be new Spiderman, finds this awkward, and asks, “Are you serious?” and when his Dad says “I want to hear it”, he yells back, “I love you, Dad.” On his police-car PA s...

My Little Pony-The Movie, review: Rainbow in her pony tail Featuring the universe of the 1986 debut, My Little Pony: The Movie, the 2017 franchise, takes us back to the good old world of traditional animation, which is a rarity in the days of VFX, CGI and Motion Capture. A veritable feast of colours and dream architecture keep you enchanted and entranced for 99 minutes, and it matters little that the series is a spin-off from Equestrian Girls, a Hasbro Toys venture, targeted at, who else? You...

In the only Urdu/Hindi film he ever made, Indian cinema’s Bengali language grandmaster Satyajit Ray used chess as a metaphor, setting it against the backdrop of the crumbling Navabi rule over Avadh (Lucknow), and its imminent take-over by the British East India company. It was simply called Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players). Another chess film, a 30-minute short made in 1988, was called Queen Sacrifice. The present film manages with just a pawn sacrifice! Two feature-length recent ...

Not since Joseph interpreted a dream of Pharaoh's shaqahhas a butler been mythologized like the hero of Lee Daniels' The Butler. Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), who worked for eight presidents from 1957 to 1986, takes his cue from the the true story of White House butler Eugene Allen. Yet this epic drama has its own master to serve, and both Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong pledge allegiance to educating viewers about history rather than to dramatizing one man's bio. At t...