Films starring Benedict Cumberbatch
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Doctor Strange (PG-13)
Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange is the latest installment in the rapidly expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, a collection of interconnected superhero movies that, to many viewers, are starting to feel like indistinguishable products. Doctor Strange sidesteps and invites that complaint in interesting ways. The broad strokes of the story here are par for the course, with […]
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Black Mass: The Cost of Looking the Other Way (R)
Bostonians can rest assured that, unlike his earlier crime film Out of the Furnace, their home city is portrayed as being remediable. It does not even seem to be particularly corrupt. What it is, however, is tribal, with the Irish and Italians constantly at one another’s throats. It is a tribalism which not only defines allegiances in the criminal underworld but also among police and federal authorities.
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12 Years A Slave (R)
It is fitting that the hero of 12 Years a Slave is called Solomon. I thought often of Ecclesiastes while watching the film. Few books in Scripture are responsible for more intellectual patricide than Ecclesiastes; begin reading any commentary on the work, and the first comment most authors feel compelled to make is something like, […]