Neil Jordan reaches deep into his Celtic soul and comes up with ONDINE, a dark romance that teases the meaning of myth into the starkly contemporary setting of a small Irish fishing village. The time is the present, but the location gives a timeless quality to the story of a fisherman who nets a beautiful… Read More »
ANIMAL KINGDOM
ANIMAL KINGDOM is a devastatingly powerful film with a brilliant performance from newcomer James Frecheville as J, a 17-year-old set adrift between a criminal family that he barely knows, and a legal system that until then has done a spectacular job of failing him. It begins with the camera drifting across two dead souls, the… Read More »
ANIMAL KINGDOM
ANIMAL KINGDOM is a devastatingly powerful film with a brilliant performance from newcomer James Frecheville as J, a 17-year-old set adrift between a criminal family that he barely knows, and a legal system that until then has done a spectacular job of failing him. It begins with the camera drifting across two dead souls, the… Read More »
EAT PRAY LOVE
EAT PRAY LOVE is a glossy travelogue of a flick, full of stereotypes and caricatures providing a colorful backdrop to Julia Roberts’ glamour lighting. Based on the book of the same name by Elizabeth Gilbert, it is the personal journey towards inner happiness taken by Liz (Julie Roberts) as she learns the lessons of the… Read More »
127 HOURS
Danny Boyle doesn’t make it easy for himself. After exploring the teeming slums of India with SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, he’s turned in a different direction with 127 HOURS. In it, James Franco, as intrepid hiker Aron Ralston, spends most of the film trapped in a sliver of a crevice carved very deep into one of the… Read More »
THE WHISTLEBLOWER
War is hell, but keeping the peace can be trickier. The clear-cut lines of who is the enemy and what it out of bounds blurs when the official fighting stops and, as in the former Yugoslavia, outsiders are sent in to keep the factions from continuing the hostilities. Such is the case of THE WHISTLEBLOWER,… Read More »
THE HELP
THE HELP, based on the novel of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, gently but firmly peels away they dry rot of racism that festered beneath the gracious, etiquette obsessed façade of southern gentility before the civil rights movement. What is remarkable, and a remarkably difficult line to walk, is that it does so while… Read More »
WARRIOR
The ultimate test of a films potency comes not when a story with its twists and turns forges new trails into unfamiliar terrain. The ultimate test may very well be if a film can take a familiar tale and make it suspenseful. WARRIOR does just that. The loosely woven story takes on not one, but… Read More »
ANONYMOUS
ANONYMOUS has a great many things going for it. A rich and suitably literate script by John Orloff. A director, Roland Emmerich, with a flair for the dramatic that meshes well with the intrigues of Elizabethan England. A special effects budget that allows the screen to be filled with vast panoramas of 16th-century London, as… Read More »
MY WEEK WITH MARILYN
The single biggest hurdle in MY WEEK WITH MARILYN is how believable the actor impersonating the icon is. For the first few minutes, there is the inevitable comparison. MM’s nose wasn’t exactly like that. Her figure was slightly different. The shape of the face is off. Yet within no more than 10 minutes, and probably… Read More »