With convincing performances, pithy punchlines, a clever script and themes that remain relevant today, Frank Capra’s 1934 classic never feels dated.
After years spent scuffling through rom-com cliches and formulaic action films, The Town star continues to revitalize his career.
Keira Knightley’s performance saves David Cronenberg’s otherwise sloppy and disjointed take on Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.
Exploring the difficulties of maintaining separation between one’s humanity and individual pursuit of greatness.
Bobby Liebling, the prodigal vocalist of the seminal metal band Pentagram, is a dichotomy, evoking the rock star persona of difficultness and stubbornness as well as the desire to be wanted and loved. Both of these personalities share one quality: the need to take each to the extreme. Pentagram has been around for thirty years, yet, in […]
Paul Haggis often has a way of beating his audience over the head with cultural rhetoric, particularly if we look at Crash as an example. At the same time, a film like Million Dollar Baby – while ostensibly about pugilism and then euthanasia – is actually much more about our cultural obsession with violence, but the hypocrisy […]
The departure from Paul Greengrass’ Bourne series to writer-now-director Tony Gilroy’s is marked and, at times, successful. Whereas the Bournes of Damon were shaky and shot with whirlwind hand-cam cinematography, The Bourne Legacy is slow and meticulous. Like his predecessor, Aaron Cross’s (Jeremy Renner) strikes and punches are amazingly quick, but the rest of the film subdued. […]
Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior looks like the latest entry into the pugilist genre, but its true theme is focused on the sublimation of violence. Admittedly, there are undercurrents of dysfunctional family tropes that ebb and flow throughout the rise of fighters and brothers Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan Conlon (Josh Edgerton). A rift in their teenage years separated […]
Dense and beautifully shot, My Life as Abraham Lincoln is as intentionally confused as is its main character, Cindy (Carolyn Luft), who attempts to navigate the converging juxtapositions of memory, expectations, the vacillating importance of matrimony, and a patriarchal society. For Cindy, her life is comprised of a series of iconographies. Photos of her best friends that […]
The based-on-a-true-story, Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film, In Darkness, positions us just there: in the sewers with raw humanity and inhumanity unrelentingly clashing in each scene. On the streets above, the darkness is metaphorical but palpable. Lives are exchanged like currency and sympathy is non-existent. Directed by Agnieszka Holland, this film is set is Lvov, Poland […]