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Arriving on the 50th anniversary of its events, Freedom Riders is an account of those first months of the American Civil Rights movement, specifically Birmingham in 1961. Fresh off of 2 separate Supreme Court desegregation decisions that had been ignored by large swaths of the South, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) [...]

Blue Valentine is now out on DVD. I worked with the writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, and one of its editors, Jimmy Helton, here at the Video Station circa 1997. It was great to work alongside of them, and in those days, Derek was a young guy working on his first big project, Brother [...]

This started out as a smarmy review of No Strings Attached. I’m not proud, I pre-judged the movie based purely on Ashton Kutcher.
I don’t like him. Can you really blame me?

The Illusionist isn’t just the long-awaited second feature from Sylvain Chomet, the French animator who made 2003’s charmingly grotesque, hauntingly comic Triplets of Belleville. It’s also, in a sense, a new film from the great mime artist turned genius director Jacques Tati (Playtime, Mon Oncle), who died in 1982. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical script Tati [...]

Mind-bending indie director Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep) proves so capable at crafting crackling action sequences in the $120 million big-screen version of The Green Hornet that it’s a shame star Seth Rogen had to go and ruin the rest of the movie.

Jolene is one of those little independent movies that introduces us to a new star without really being a great film itself. It’s certainly not unwatchable–it’s shot fairly well and it has an engaging enough cast–but it kind of drifts from scene to scene without any strong momentum. The title character [...]

With few exceptions, the films that tackle historical periods and their figures best are those that attack their subjects a bit obliquely. When asked to summon a cinematic image of D-Day, for instance, most might think first of Saving Private Ryan, which merely uses Omaha Beach as the visceral prologue [...]

I don’t have kids, so I can only imagine what it would feel like to suddenly lose one. Rabbit Hole, a pretty-looking piece of Oscar bait starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, means to show us such pain, but doesn’t wholly succeed.

In 1940, in the middle of a Siberian winter, a group of prisoners escape a Soviet labour camp. Only barbed wire to cut through, then losing guards in whiteout conditions and pine forest. They dared this with a few survival skills and scraps of food to sustain them, knowing that staying [...]

Any of you who are old enough (like me) to remember the heyday of record stores, especially of Tower Records, may remember a classical music recording that was one of the first true crossover phenomenons – A Feather on the Breath of God, by Hildegard von Bingen. At the time, it [...]