The widespread critical and commercial success of?Despicable Me I & II?guaranteed that the little yellow beings would get their own film. While the character of Gru (Steve Carrell) was their leader/master/boss in the original pair of films, the prequel,?Minions, promised to fill us in on how Kevin, Stuart, and Bob ended up working in the…
Have you got your tickets? That seems to have been one of the main questions amongst Star Wars fans over the last 6 weeks. Amazingly, as soon as Fandango opened their digital doors for advance tickets for The Force Awakens, the latest chapter in the Star Wars canon, they didn?t just get snapped up? they…
If you are a geek like me, the end of November and the start of December has been a time of joy. In a matter of a week, we have gotten the trailer for Captain America: Civil War and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Both set the internet ablaze, but it seems that only…
Do you know the Moomins? They are the characters in a series of Swedish/Finnish children books and comics dating back to the 1930s that have found their way to scores of languages around the world. Now they come to the big screen in Moomins on the Riviera, a hand-animated film that is very much child-oriented….
Early in Janis: Little Girl Blue, we hear Janis Joplin talking about ambition and reducing it to the need to be loved. That need was a driving force in her life, her career, and even in her terrible struggles. Even forty-five years after her death, she continues to be an icon of rock and roll….
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Macbeth is one of several plays by Shakespeare that could easily remind modern audiences of Game of…
French New Wave director Fran?ois Truffaut wrote the book on Alfred Hitchcock?literally. In 1962 he did a series of interviews (through a translator) with Hitchcock over six days with twenty seven hours of tapes discussing each of Hitchcock?s films. He later put gleanings from those interviews into one of the definitive books on filmmaking. In…
When horror writer Clint Hadson (Elijah Wood) arrives at Fort Chicken Elementary school to moonlight as a substitute teacher, he has no idea that a?Shaun of the Dead-like zombie apocalypse is about to rip his alma mater apart. Can the adults at the school survive the rampant, chicken nugget-born illness or will their petty infighting…
American Ultra?stars Jamie Eisenberg as lovable stoner Mike Howell, the kind of?guy you encourage to aim higher but who is already quite high to begin with. Thanks to his girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), Mike aspires for more but his anxieties and insecurities always short circuit his plans. That is, until shadowy government ages converge on…
?If you put beauty into a place that generally doesn?t have it, that?s a game changer.? Can gardening change people?s lives? That is the question that led Delila Vallot to make Can You Dig This?, a documentary that features urban gardening in some of the must depressed areas of Los Angeles. The idea of guerrilla…
