Over a decade ago, on the way to a youth retreat, one of my senior high students asked if we could play the album of an up-and-coming comedian in the van. After some discussion over the comedian’s content and language, I agreed with the stipulations that it would be both clean?and?funny. An hour later, having…
The Oscar races this year are absolutely clear cut… in my mind. Having seen fourteen?of the nominated films?(out of approximately sixteen?films in the major categories),?these are my favorites to win. At Best Actor, the portrayal of screenwriter and Communist Dalton Trumbo by Bryan Cranston put him in rare air, not that of the illicit drugs…
Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) wrote excellent scripts but his membership in the Communist Party made him anathema in the mid-nineteenth century. After he was sentenced to eleven months in prison, he became a persona non grata in Hollywood, but found a way to use his words to tell stories… even if he couldn’t get credit…
I begrudgingly watched?another?Steve Jobs film. Seriously, was there more information to be covered, some new angle to be unveiled? As a matter of fact, there was. Thanks to Danny Boyle’s (Sunshine, 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire)?direction and Michael Fassbender’s nuanced performance,?Steve Jobs?is a worthy Academy Award nominee with Fassbender’s portrayal of Jobs at its center. While…
When Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) defaults on his mortgage payments, real estate mogul Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) takes his house. Fighting to get a set of tools back from Carver’s work crew, Nash is offered various roles that allow him to climb from gofer to righthand man. But while Carver appears to have taken ownership…
Johnny Depp was the face of evil in 2015. There, I said it. Thanks to the 2001 non-fiction expose, Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, Depp delivered a magnificently wicked performance as Whitey Bulger. (The only other film that came close to that was?Denis Villeneuve’s?Sicario,…
I don’t usually do horror, but when I do … it’s Guillermo del Toro. Not all directors hit it out of the park for me every time, but del Toro does. While I didn’t?love?Hellboy, it was engaging;?Pacific Rim?and?Pan’s Labyrinth?are exquisitely visualized tales that would make James Cameron blush. And then, there’s?Crimson Peak. Centered around Edith…
Love the Coopers?isn’t a great film but it has its moments. An ensemble tale revolving around Christmas and the breaking down of the parental relationship within the Cooper family, the film puts the pieces together in a way that provides a few laughs and some serious soul searching. The audience’s appreciation will be directly related…
Based on the British series?MI-5, the feature-length film?MI-5?(or?Spooks: The Greater Good) tells the story of how head Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) works to uncover who is imploding his agency from the inside. After a terrorist (Scorpion’s?Elyes Gabel) escapes, the heat is turned up on MI-5 and Pearce fakes his death to go looking for him….
In the latest Steven Spielberg-directed thriller, Tom Hanks stars as James Donovan, an insurance lawyer who finds himself in Russia?in the middle of a spy swap. Based on the 1957 Cold War friction revolving around Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) and Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), the film ratchets up in intensity and emotion as it races…
