Manchester by the Sea
The Manchester of the title is a coastal town along the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay, about 30 miles northeast from Boston. Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is a dejected man with a tragic past. A beleaguered soul, he is withdrawn, almost surly. He works as a handyman for a Boston apartment building complex. Early on, […]
Moana
If there’s an archetype that Disney is most known for, it’s the princess. Snow White, Cinderella Sleeping Beauty – these are the classics. In recent years we’ve added ones from Tangled and Frozen. The studio’s latest offering is Moana (voiced by Hawaiian teen Auli’i Cravalho). Ok so she’s actually the daughter of her tribe’s Chief […]
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
It’s been 5 years since the Harry Potter series ended in 2011. That saga may be over and done, but it doesn’t mean we can’t revisit the world. In 2001, J.K. Rowling published what was purportedly one of Harry Potter’s textbooks from Hogwarts, the school of witchcraft and wizardry. The plotless tome was attributed to […]
Nocturnal Animals
Without warning, wealthy art gallery owner Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) receives a letter from her ex-husband, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal). He requests that she read his first novel, Nocturnal Animals, which he has also included in the package. This lure is merely the tantalizing set-up for a crackerjack thriller. We learn that the title was […]
Hacksaw Ridge
It certainly is an amusing irony that one of the most graphically violent war films ever made is in fact about a man who refused to pick up a gun. The subject of Mel Gibson’s heartfelt biography is Desmond Doss, an American pacifist who served in the U.S. Army during World War II . After […]
Arrival
Oh, what hath 2001: A Space Odyssey wrought? Ever since Stanley Kubrick’s trippy, mind-expanding space adventure first unfurled back in 1968, the intersection of extraterrestrial life and the human experience at the movies has never been the same. The original set the bar inspiring a varying degree of diminishing results ever since. The latest sci-fi […]
Doctor Strange
Comic-book productions currently entertain as large a share of the overall film audience as they ever have. Moviegoers are inundated with product. This is the fourteenth entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) alone. I’m not even counting other features based on Marvel fiction like X-Men or Spider-Man and then there’s DC and all of […]
Loving
It almost sounds like a poetic fabrication that the last name of Mildred and Richard was Loving. The name also serves as the film’s title. The appellation would seem a bit too precious if it weren’t simply a fact. Adding to the irony of the situation is that “one of the most iconic ad campaigns […]
Moonlight
Coming-of-age tales are so often fraught with cliches that the very label is almost a disservice to films saddled with the description. The common details that unite one coming-of-age story with another are a bit ambiguous. They often concern a central figure who begins as a youth and reaches adulthood by the end. In that […]
The Light Between Oceans
Labor Day weekend is the very last weekend of the summer season. It’s not a desirable date on which to have a movie released. Unfortunately this is the slot onto which The Light Between Oceans was unceremoniously dumped by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures . This being the final DreamWorks film distributed by Disney through […]