Alan Bennett may be the Michel de Montaigne of our present age. Starting from the very personal, he composes perfect gems of reflection on the human condition as a whole. Where Montaigne was limited to the personal essay, Bennett essays several creative outlets, including memoir, theater and film, which brings us to THE LADY IN… Read More »
13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI
With his trademark bombast, Michael Bay addresses the tragedy of Benghazi with great attention to the details of battle, and only the most superficial of attitudes towards everything else. Based on the book by Mitchell Zuckoff that recounted the 2012 attack by local insurgents on the temporary American embassy and the CIA station in that… Read More »
THE REVENANT
With THE REVENANT, Alejandro González Iñárritu has taken the true story of early 19th-century frontier scout Hugh Glass, and admirably manipulated it into a spiritual journey of savage poetry. Glass’s story, rendered cinematically in the 1970’s by Richard Harris in MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, becomes much more here. Iñárritu uses the bare bones of the… Read More »
CONCUSSION
By comparing the National Football League’s reaction to medical evidence linking repeated head trauma by its players to long-term brain damage and that of the tobacco industry’s reaction to medical evidence linking cancer and cigarette smoking, CONCUSSION cleverly makes its case. If it were just a case for corporate greed, that would be disturbing enough,… 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 »
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 »
James Vanderbilt Examines TRUTH
I did not expect James Vanderbilt to do his impression of Roland Emmerich for me. And I certainly didn’t expect it to be so dead on. Vanderbilt was talking to me on October 2, 2015, about his upcoming collaboration with Emmerich on the sequel to INDEPENDENCE DAY, the script for which Vanderbilt contributed, and I… Read More »
BRIDGE OF SPIES
Clad, metaphorically, in a shining armor of truth, and wielding an equally luminous sword of righteousness, Tom Hanks as attorney James Donovan is the embodiment of American virtue, right down to the meat loaf he has for dinner, the which is not touched until he has said grace with his wife and three kids. There was, no… Read More »
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- …
- 16
- Next Page »