In Pixar’s latest hit animated feature, Arlo the young Apatosaurus finds himself forced out into the wild after his father is swept away by a flood and he encounters a cave child, who he calls Spot. Blaming Spot for his father’s death, Arlo accidentally leaves his mother behind in an attempt to exact some sort…
Twenty years after his mother was murdered by terrorists, Harry Turner (Kellan Lutz) must go on a frantic rescue mission (of sorts) to save his father, legendary CIA operative Leonard Turner (Bruce Willis). When his ex-girlfriend and current operative Victoria (Gina Carano) is sent to stop him, the two join forces in an attempt to…
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…
Forget Sly, Arnold, Clint, Mel, Dolph or even Chuck. Everyone knows the toughest action star of the 80’s was Kurt. And when he wasn’t trying to get the a president out of post-apocalyptic New York or defeat Asian demigods in Little China, Kurt Russell was busy in Antarctica, battling claustrophobia, paranoia and body-snatching aliens?all in…
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…
Back when I was in high school and college, Kahlil Gibran?s book The Prophet was very popular. It is a collection of prose poems about various aspects of life. It has a strong humanist view of life, but also a very spiritual understanding.
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?m sure that many people head to the kitchen for dessert when the Oscar is awarded for Best Foreign Language Film. But that is one of the categories that I pay special attention to. Films that come from other countries and cultures often give us wonderful insights into the what the world is like outside our own cultural bubble.
