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 »
BURIED
It would be easy, and a huge mistake, to dismiss BURIED as a stunt film. Sure, Ryan Reynolds spends the entire 94 minutes of the running time buried underground in a box, but such is the imaginative take on the subject by screenwriter Chris Sparling and director Roderigo Cortes, that the struggle of one confined… Read More »
THE GREY
The best moment, the one that perfectly sums up THE GREY, is the one where a character has decided to die. Not because pain and fatigue suffered by that character have muddled his judgment and clouded his mind, though the actor involved certainly brings that, no, the decision to die is more transcendent than that,… Read More »
GREY, THE
The best moment, the one that perfectly sums up THE GREY, is the one where a character has decided to die. Not because pain and fatigue suffered by that character have muddled his judgment and clouded his mind, though the actor involved certainly brings that, no, the decision to die is more transcendent than that,… Read More »
ALBERT NOBBS
This is how good Glenn Close is as the eponymous ALBERT NOBBS. At one point her character, who has lived as a man for decades in Victorian Ireland, dons a dress for an outing to the beach and it just looks wrong. Close, the epitome of feminine elegance, doesnt clomp around, nor does she become… Read More »