RICHARD JEWELL certainly has the makings of a compelling, infuriating cautionary tale about the abuse of power, but Clint Eastwood’s homage to the common man chooses instead to be a screed against ambitious women and government agents at the mercy of their hormones. Everything that ensues after Jewell finds a bomb planted at Centennial Part… Read More »
THE CURRENT WAR: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT
THE CURRENT WAR: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT is an elegantly realized intellectual thriller which considers not only the eternal struggle between art and commerce, but also the effect of personalities on inventing the future. In this case, three visionaries, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla. Each with a particular kind of genius, each with idiosyncrasies… Read More »
HARRIET
HARRIET achieves the proper, and richly deserved, tone of reverence for its subject, Harriet Tubman. That is, alas, its greatest failing. The astonishing life of one of the most courageous Americans who has ever lived is told in a series of set pieces, vignettes with all drama sapped from them as they take on the… Read More »
GEMINI MAN
It is the age old question, just because we >can< so something, does that automatically mean that we should? In the case of pitting an older Will Smith against a younger Will Smith courtesy of the slick visual effects in GEMINI MAN, the answer is a resounding no. Make that NO. The visual trickery that… Read More »
HUSTLERS
HUSTLERS is about as subtle as a pole dance when it comes to making a case for the poetic justice of what a gang of strippers did to the very Wall Street bankers who plunged the country into financial chaos back in 2008. And that is how it should be. The script written by director… Read More »
LUCE
LUCE is less a film than a political dialectic on race and class in these United States, and a brilliant, exquisitely performed one at that. Told with a deliberate, sometimes maddening ambiguity, it challenges the audience at every turn about where the truth lies, and the limits of familial loyalty. By the end, not every… Read More »
BRIAN BANKS
BRIAN BANKS is an earnest film that hits all the necessary and expected plot points as it makes its cogent indictment of the criminal justice system. It never becomes a screed, though the based-on-a-true story of 16-year-old who ended up serving time for a rape he didn’t commit certainly has all the elements to support… Read More »
THE BEST OF ENEMIES
We know going in to THE BEST OF ENEMIES that there will be soul-searching and redemption. The challenge for director Robin Bissell in adapting this true-life story from the book by Osha Gray Davidson was to frame doing the right thing in terms that truly demonstrate to the audience the temper of the times that… Read More »
RED JOAN
Science is pure. A hypothesis is either true or it isn’t and the scientific method can be used, unfailingly, to prove it. Politics and human emotions are another story, as we learn in RED JOAN, a drama of that most potent mixture, love and politics. Based on a true story, it considers questions of loyalty… Read More »
MAZE
There is a distinct strain of melancholy nihilism throughout Stephen Burke’s MAZE. Based on the 1983 prison break by 38 inmates of the eponymous maximum security prison in Norther Ireland, it mixes the suspense of plotting an escape dependant upon split-second timing from an inescapable prison with the psychological games the prisoners play with the… Read More »
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