The Shape of Water, Review: Half full, half empty It’s co-written and directed Guillermo del Toro. And here is an excerpt of the synopsis: In the hidden high-security government laboratory where she works, lonely Elisa is trapped in a life of isolation. Elisa's life is changed forever when she and co-worker Zelda discover a secret classified experiment. Sounds interesting? Yes. Premise can work on its own? As a sci-fi thriller, yes, but as an allegory and metaphor-packed Guillermo d...

Paddington 2, review: Bear maximum Imagine a London where bears are accepted as persons and move about freely; a London where Aunt Lucy and her nephew Paddington board a bus and buy tickets for “One-and-a-half bears.” Imagine a bear named Paddington, so called because his adoptive human family find him at Paddington railway station. And imagine a bear that has the highest moral standards and sets the benchmark for ethics and courtesy, not only among regular humans, but even jailbi...

Paddington, Review: Please see this film. Thank you. In 1956, a BBC cameraman bought a small toy bear left alone on a shelf in the iconic Selfridges store, London, for his wife Brenda. Named Paddington, after the train station close to Michael Bond’s home, the bear inspired him to write eight episodes in just over a week, featuring the bear from Deepest Peru. It was published as a book in 1958. Meanwhile, the station was made famous when ‘4.50 from Paddington’ was published,...

The first utterances you hear in Woody Allen's latest picture, Blue Jasmine, come from a manic First Class passenger who blabs on and on about herself. That passenger is title  character Jasmine, whose marriage to Madoff avatar Hal (Alec Baldwin) is now as finished as her 1% coffers, and who's going nowhere fast. She's also played by Cate Blanchett, which helps explain why we not only put up with her snobbish affectations, we can't g...

  by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent   When the mantle is passed, Hollywood usually makes a show of it. Consider Julia Roberts' crown going to Anne Hathaway, or Katharine Hepburn grudgingly making way for Meryl Streep. With Woody Allen's late career opus, Blue Jasmine, the mantle has just passed from Meryl Streep to Cate Blanchett, and she is phenomenal.  There are subtleties Blanchett taps into here that evoke a little bit of Vivien Leigh, Susan Hayward...