All Film Reviews

A Serious Man (R)

Various Christian media outlets championed True Grit as the acme of the Coen brothers work with religious material, although I think A Serious Man renders True Grit as hollow as a flintlock gun barrel. Of all the qualities the film owns which might be discussed, the passage which immediately follows the prologue is of peculiar […]
Inception (PG-13)

In the same way genealogies provide foundation for expounding upon and explaining the personhood and character of real human beings, so any good author deserves to have any individual work placed into the context and trajectory of their oeuvre. Whether or not Christopher Nolan is a good man, I cannot say, although by this point […]
The Bling Ring (PG-13)

The Bling Ring is not an ambitious movie. The show might be aptly criticized for not being ambitious enough, but then I think moviemaking as a whole might collapse under the weight of such a demand. In truth, there are less than a dozen ambitious filmmakers alive. You say there are more. I say there […]
Blood Diamond (R)

Edward Zwick is a romantic. With his films: Legends Of The Fall, The Last Samurai, and Defiance, the director/producer’s style is clear. He revels in grandness; relishes sweeping shots and heart-tugging stories. But this isn’t a problem. Quite the contrary. His films come off not like documentaries voiced by Oprah, but as impressive and beautiful […]
Dallas Buyers Club (R)

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas, who is known as much for his poetry as his alcoholism, wrote these words for his dying father. […]
Her (R)

Her, written and directed by Spike Jonze, contains three scenes of strong sexual content, and at least two other scenes with frank sexual language. All the sex is varyingly virtual. The movie uses sex both to demonstrate closeness between characters, and the gaps between them. Taken as whole, however, it’s not clear that Jonze understands […]
Pacific Rim (PG-13)

I remember as a child having near hallucinogenic nightmares after watching Jurassic Park for the first time on our old black and white, sixteen-inch television. After not being able to sleep at all the night after, I wanted to watch it again the next day. Such is the magic of cinema, I suppose. A well […]
Blue Jasmine (PG-13)

There’s something rote about Woody Allen films. In his sixth decade of filmmaking, both writing and directing, he has crafted and refined his own genre: neurosis plus jazz, adultery and A-listers; sometimes there’s murder, often there’s humor, but it is always with a deep sense of mortality. “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my […]
Prisoners (R)

If it is fair to go by numbers, movies about demons are both cheap and easy to make. Depending on how broadly you are willing to define “demon,” I would wager something demonic hits an American theater once a month. The never-ending spate of creepy kid movies which yet issue forth from The Ring’s wake, […]
Junebug (R)

In Flannery O’Connor’s seminal lecture Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction she uses the expression “Christ-haunted” to describe the South. Since first reading this, I have been haunted by this idea of Christ-hauntedness. She goes on to say that the Southerner “who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may […]
24 Questions for Sunshine (R)

“Cinema is truth at 24 frames per second.” -Jean-Luc Godard “Cinema is lies at 24 frames per second.” -Michael Haneke One of the most important components of interpretation is the peerless act of questioning. Frequently the question carries value even apart from an answer and the right question will always outwork an easy answer. The […]
A Charlie Brown Christmas (G)

“Show, don’t tell” is the oldest law of storytelling, that thing which frustrated short fiction profs shout, mutter, whisper, beg and plead over and again in student workshops. “Don’t tell me Pat is angry. Show me. Did he lower his voice? Did he take deep breaths and shake his head? What?” And yet, the oldest […]
Philomena (PG-13)

Stephen Frears is no Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin. His latest film, Philomena, like The Queen before it, is blissfully absent of soap box preaching. Given the material Frears is working with, that’s a extraordinary feat, exuding a generosity worthy of the film’s main character, Philomena Lee. Based loosely on the book The Lost Child […]
The Magnificent Ambersons (G)

Orson Welles’ movies are generally too good to be simply “issue” movies. Citizen Kane is conversant about “the press.” Touch of Evil touches on “corruption.” The Magnificent Ambersons raises the question of “industrialization.” But the movies always invest more deeply in characters and the strangeness of human behavior. Using an “issue” of the day as […]
A Christmas Carol (1938 Version) (G)

Of all the works of Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol may have acquired the most settled place in the popular imagination. It is one of a very few books which one need not even have read to recognize a character from a picture or a well-worn quotation. It is also the simplest major work composed […]
Frozen (PG)

In the first minutes of Frozen, the older of two sisters nearly kills the younger, making it the rare Disney Princess Movie initiated by a brush with mortality. The principle concerns of the movie fall out around this life and death incident. We learn: That the older sister has the power to create and control […]
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (PG-13)

Two FilmFisher reviewer’s took on the latest Ben Stiller picture and took away comparable, but distinct impressions. Please enjoy both sides. Tom’s take: The lonely individual’s flight from mediocrity has, in our time, provided the motif of many films, most of which fail to rise above mediocrity. The patriarch of the genre is The Man […]
Out of the Furnace (R)

The revenge drama holds a special place in American cinema. More than any society since pagan Greece we find satisfaction in watching a man achieve his desire over his enemies. The elements of the story are gratifying enough to have grown into a formula. The protagonist (nearly always a man of average temperament and social […]
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, […]
The Book Thief (PG-13)

“This is Heaven Street.” The Book Thief (2013) is the story of Liesel Memminger (Sophie Nelisse), a young orphan on the brink of adolescence who is transported to a quaint German town amidst the boom of World War II when her Communist mother relinquishes her to the care of German foster parents Hans and Rosa […]