Not Fade Away
1960s coming of age memoir concerns three best friends from New Jersey who decide to form a rock band. Television writer-director David Chase is best known for creating the influential and critically acclaimed HBO drama The Sopranos. Here he makes his feature film début after having worked in television for 30 years. Not Fade Away […]
Zero Dark Thirty
Zero Dark Thirty is an effective blend of logic and emotion, fact and fiction in depicting the decade long search for Osama Bin Laden. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to The Hurt Locker is another drama concerning the military, likewise based on a script by Mark Boal. It starts with a black screen and real recordings […]
Rust and Bone
Ali is a penniless man with his five-year-old son Sam to take care of. While crashing at his sister’s place, he gets a job as a bouncer at a local nightclub, relying on his abilities as a former street fighter. Stéphanie is a woman who works as a killer whale trainer at a marine mammal […]
Les Misérables
Les Misérables is an achievement, the cinematic realization that fans have waited almost 3 decades. The stage musical is a global sensation. It opened in London on October 1985 and has run continuously since. The Broadway rendition debuted 2 years after the West End debut and became the fourth longest-running show in U.S. history. The […]
Django Unchained
Django Unchained is Quentin Tarantino’s full bodied and bloody take on the spaghetti western with a little 70’s era blaxploitation thrown in. Taking place in the pre-Civil War South, the plot concerns a freed slave who takes revenge on a plantation owner in order to rescue his wife. Our story begins with Dr. King Schultz, […]
The Impossible
On December 26, 2004 a tsunami occurred in the Indian Ocean as a result of an earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The tragedy was responsible for the deaths of over 230,000 people in fourteen countries. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Indonesia was the hardest-hit, followed by […]
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Note: This movie is being shown in select theaters at High Frame Rate 3D which at 48 frames per second supposedly offers a much sharper image. Since (A) I happened to see the film in 24 FPS, the cinema standard for over a century, (B) the vast majority of theaters are showing it in 24 […]
Holy Motors
If I were to observe an open heart surgery as a series of procedures sans narration, I might at various moments throughout the process be repulsed, then fascinated. I’d have no idea what would come next and so I would be compelled to keep watching from a curiosity standpoint – spellbound by the procedure in […]
Rise of the Guardians
Rise of the Guardians involves four characters from fairy tales: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the Sandman who appeal to Jack Frost to stop the Boogeyman from engulfing the world in darkness. It’s kind of a pan-holiday movie that takes place in the days leading up to Easter. It specifically concerns […]
Anna Karenina
Salt & pepper, peanut butter & jelly, Keira Knightly & period pieces. These pairings go together as if they were designed to be united. I must admit I’m a bit biased in Keira’s favor when it comes to these types of costume dramas. She has a timelessness that seems to fit theses epics like hand […]