Click here to listen to the interview. Ellen Page optioned the rights to FREEHELD when she was 21. Eight years later, Cynthia Wade’s Oscar-winning documentary short is a feature film co-starring Page and Julianne Moore as Stacie Andree and Laurel Hester, the same-sex couple who challenged the Freeholders of Ocean County, NJ for Hester’s right… Read More »
Chiwetel Ejiofor Experiences 12 YEARS A SLAVE
12 YEARS A SLAVE is based on the shocking true story of Solomon Northup, a musician and free man of color with a wife and two children who lived in New York in the first half of the 19th century. He was sold into slavery, where he languished for over a decade, and, against all… Read More »
BLACK HAWK DOWN — Ridley Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer Interview
Based on Mark Bowden’s book about a failed attempt by U.S. troops to kidnap a Somali warlord’s underlings, and those troops subsequent struggle to fight their way out of the city of Mogadishu, BLACK HAWK DOWN is a poetically brutal film about is a tragic chapter in American military history. When I spoke with Ridley Scott… Read More »
STONEWALL
STONEWALL is a sudsy, underwritten, overwrought effort that is less than the intended tribute to the unsung heroes of the eponymous riots that accelerated the gay liberation movement into the social mainstream. Instead, it is a melodrama of truly epic proportions told with every cliché of gay life as lived in less enlightened times, and with… Read More »
PAWN SACRIFICE
Chess has never been more compelling cinematically than in PAWN SACRIFICE. Whether you know nothing about the game, or you are a grand master, the story of Bobby Fischer’s rise to the world championship, and the toll it took on his already fragile psyche, has all the suspense and intrigue of an espionage thriller. That… Read More »
ZERO DARK THIRTY
ZERO DARK THIRTY starts, tellingly, with a dark screen and audio clips from 9/11. Air traffic control chatter, 911 calls, and the anguished, astonished voices of people who have no frame of reference for what is happening to and around them. In doing so, the film compels the viewer to relive that day not with… Read More »
THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT’s Heart of Darkness
In retrospect, the excesses of Abu Ghraib were all too accurately predicted by the now infamous behavioral experiment conducted in 1971 by Stanford professor, Dr. Philip Zimbardo (Billy Crudup). The dramatization as THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT wisely takes the clinical approach, employing the detachment of the scientific method in recreating the events that are as… Read More »
Welcome to JIMMY’S HALL
Ken Loach has never been a filmmaker to shy away from politics. In fact, a case could be made that the reason he makes films is to explore politics, the which he has done with such strident films as BREAD AND ROSES (union organizing in contemporary Los Angeles) and LAND AND FREEDOM (the Spanish Civil… Read More »
Maya Forbes’ Pet INFINITELY POLAR BEAR
Click here to listen to the interview. Maya Forbes has been a screenwriter for years, with co-credits for MONSTERS AND ALIENS and DIARY OF A WIMPY KID to her credit. She was also a writer and story editor on HBO’s groundbreaking THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW. For her directorial debut, though, she chose a script she… Read More »
Going Beyond BLACK OR WHITE
Mike Binder has a particular genius for showing people brimming with good intentions, but flawed, stumbling through life without the operating instructions that would help them negotiate the bumps along the way. He has the gift of showing humor and pathos as elements that are not so much disparate, as entwined, manifesting at oddest moments… Read More »
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