In Chronicle we get one of the year’s best films, a fun and cool and awesome piece of lower-budget sci-fi that uses the found footage format, a simple but neat premise and seamless special effects to deftly detail in larger-than-life fashion what I imagine are the horrors of being a bullied teenager today. Dreamed up [...]
Read More Chronicle, Dane DeHaan, David, drama, Josh Trank, Max Landis, Sci-Fi, thrillerLight the fuse… Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (note the official title uses a dash to avoid the awkwardness of two colons) is, arguably, the best of the four Tom Cruise-led films based on the classic 1966-1973 TV series. This has a lot to do with the hiring of director Brad Bird, who heretofore had [...]
Read MoreWhere did Michael Fassbender come from? It’s a legitimate question. The Irish actor seems to have been a presence in films for years, but, in truth, has only been seen on the big screen for a handful, after spending his formative time as an addendum on BBC police procedurals. After a stint in UK horror, [...]
Read MoreInto the Abyss is the story of a triple homicide committed in Conroe, Texas on October 24th 2001, perpetrated by Michael Perry (18 years old) and Jason Burkett (19 years old). It was originally an episode in the four part television mini-series Werner Herzog directed called On Death Row airing on Discovery I.D. channel.
Read More“War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.” When Winston Churchill wrote those words in the years after World War I, he was certainly in part lamenting the passing into history of the war horse, the millennia-old instrument of warfare who was conditioned (as was the man on its [...]
Read MoreDirected by Cameron Crowe, We Bought a Zoo is the story of Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) who moves his two kids Dylan and Rosie (Colin Ford and Maggie Elizabeth Jones) to a dilapidated zoo, to get away from all the reminders of his recently deceased wife. Dylan is a dark and moody teenager, and Rosie [...]
Read MoreThe Hedgehog is a near perfect little French movie. It’s the story of an 11-year-old girl who is smart and cynical, and decides to end her life on her 12th birthday. Why? She sees hypocrisy and emptiness in the lives of the adults around her. Paloma, inhabited beautifully by Garance Le Guillermic, is precocious, creative, [...]
Read MoreI will often get angry about U.S. remakes of foreign films, and it happens quite often, so this may explain my general demeanor. Eat Drink Man Woman becomes Tortilla Soup, Breathless (1960) becomes Breathless (1983), Il Postino becomes The Postman. That last one’s not really a remake, but I like to imagine that they were [...]
Read MoreWhatever history will decide were the merits of the Cold War, and beyond a shared belief in political fear mongering and secret microphones it’s all a bit dubious, it cannot be argued that the prime beneficiaries of nearly 40 years of undercover ‘spy-jinks’ (a word I just invented, and will now trademark in hopes of [...]
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