In many ways, CREED is a formula film, but one done with so much palpable affection and respect on the part of director and co-writer Ryan Coogler for its inspiration, ROCKY, that it’s impossible to not be swept along by it. Expanding that franchise’s universe, he takes it into the next generation by giving Rocky’s… Read More »
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM
To see a Guy Maddin film is to have the disconcerting experience of having the horrors of the commonplace revealed. With the most delicate shifting of perspective, and by only a few metaphorical millimeters, hitherto unsuspected absurdities are made manifest, resulting in a comedy to give you nightmares, and nightmares to make you howl with… Read More »
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY — Part 2
THE HUNGER GAMES may be based on a wildly popular young adult series of novels, but the film adaptations have always tackled issues that are powerfully adult and presented as such. Set in an unspecified future, the class system has run so wild that the life and death of the proletariat class has become institutionalized… Read More »
SPOTLIGHT
SPOTLIGHT does more than dissect the passions at work in the investigative news process. As riveting as the specifics are of how The Boston Globe’s special investigative team chased down the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, it’s the larger question, that of how wide-spread sexual abuse of children by priests could have flourished for… Read More »
BLACK MASS
It is only the smallest of exaggerations to say that there are only two types of scenes in BLACK MASS. One is of James “Whitey” Bulger either having someone executed with a vicious precision, or doing the dastardly deed himself. The other is an assemblage of characters having an extended conversation about what has happened… Read More »
SPECTRE
There are very specific things we want in a James Bond film. Great action, dastardly villains who are larger than life and twice as buggy, and Bond girls who have evolved over the years to be a bit more than merely a pulchritudinous interlude. In Bond, as incarnated by Daniel Craig, we want a steely… Read More »
NASTY BABY
It’s a toss-up which is more unpredictable: creative impulse when given full rein, or that same impulse when it is stymied, though, perhaps one is a little that is more dangerous than the other. The struggle, be it artistic or procreative, is the theme of Sebastian Silva’s NASTY BABY, a modern fable about family, friendship,… Read More »
OUR BRAND IS CRISIS
OUR BRAND IS CRISIS is an oft told tale of political machinations played in the vacuum of the zero-sum game that is the electoral process in modern times. In it, we are reminded, candidates are products, issues are what the spin-meisters dictate, and the public is there to provide the score card used by which… Read More »
TRUTH
James Vanderbilt’s TRUTH is a careful, disturbing dissection of the triumph of style over substance, flash over facts, insinuated itself, and then took over, television news. Based on the book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, it examines that moment in history when the eponymous truth… Read More »
ROOM
ROOM is a profound meditation on the human condition, a meditation as bittersweet as life itself, and as uplifting as a child’s innocence. Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, it confronts the barbaric simplicity of captivity, by contrasting it with the confusing complexity of freedom. What should be easy is not. Happiness is elusive.… Read More »
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