Drama Films
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Divergent (PG-13)
Why do we eat candy canes at Christmas? Why are they red and white? Why do we fold our hands to pray? If you ask a child these questions, they often offer an acrobatic answer. By the time they enter middle school, at least in this day and age, the answers become less and less […]
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A Most Wanted Man (R)
The surveillance state has a human face. In A Most Wanted Man’s telling of it, it is the gruff, unshaven, alcohol-bloated, nicotine-addled visage of Gunther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a spy who looks like he has a way to travel before he can come in from the cold. As the lead field agent of a […]
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Enemy (R)
Encountering a double, or doppelganger, is an ancient fear with long literary credentials. There’s something primeval about it, the pagan myths are replete with twins, both evil and otherwise, and the Bible has some very famous twins of its own (Jacob and Esau being the primary example), but perhaps the one that connects most readily […]
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Falling Down (R)
I used to live about three miles from where I worked, which is close enough, although twelve stoplights separated the front door of my house from the front door of my place of business. On the wrong afternoon drive home, the fact that Cain’s first great project after slaying his brother was to build a […]
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Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (PG-13)
Thomas Hobbes argued that the natural state of human affairs is one of universal conflict—all against all, neighbor against neighbor. That he failed to apply this dictum to hyper-sentient apes can be excused as the myopia of the seventeenth century. One escapes this warlike state of nature—perpetual war with one’s neighbors—says Hobbes, by banding together with […]
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Network (R)
It has been 38 years since Howard Beale shouted “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” at a television camera. The mood comes and goes, but America is still mad as hell, though it is not quite sure what it is unwilling to take—rising crime, unemployment, government healthcare, government shut […]
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America: Imagine the World Without Her (Not Rated)
The title of America: Imagine the World Without Her is a misnomer for which a marketing consultant should be sacked. Despite a few brief special effect images, I did not walk away from this docudrama with any sense of what the world would be without America. Aside from suggesting that had George Washington died in battle, Mt. […]
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A River Runs Through It (PG)
Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It is set in the early 1900’s “at the junction of great trout rivers in Missoula, Montana” against the backdrop of the Bitterroot Mountains in the northwest of the state. It would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful setting for such a story, and it is to the […]
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Jersey Boys (R)
It is unfair to condemn a pop music biopic for its family resemblance to most any other entry in the genre, since the history of one pop act’s rise and fall is more or less the same as another. Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys is by turns a light-hearted, then solemn account of ‘60s hitmakers Franky Valli […]
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To the Wonder (Not Rated)
It begins at the Wonder, La Merveille, Mont-Saint-Michel in France to be exact, with Neil and Marina at an early edge of love, leap or let go is the question. She cavorts along the coast as the tide swells and he, as implacable as the sea, follows; whether entranced or temporarily entrapped in her orbit […]
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All About Eve (Not Rated)
All About Eve opens with an award – the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achivement, addressed to Miss Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), placed squarely in the center of the frame. Describing the ceremony, Addison DeWitt (an unforgettably sardonic George Sanders, elsewhere described as a “venomous fishwife”) dryly announces, “Minor awards are for such as the […]
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Short Term 12 (R)
It’s very easy to be dismissive of a movie like Short Term 12. It’s an indie drama that tells a story about troubled teenagers, which is the sort of film that draws adoring critics like ants to a watermelon rind. The fact that Short Term 12 rises above melodrama at all is almost a miracle in itself, but […]
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Joe (R)
Joe Bageant tried to summarize rural Southern life with his book title, Deer Hunting with Jesus. With his new movie Joe, David Gordon Green presents the South’s Goth image, one that might be described with a title such as Deer Hunting, but Jesus Couldn’t Make It This Weekend. All of the classical tropes of a […]
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Inside Llewyn Davis (R)
“Hang me, oh, hang me,” sings Llewyn Davis mournfully in the opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen’s newest film, Inside Llewyn Davis. It’s an appropriately melancholy choice, slyly setting up the film’s abundant use of gallows humor and the travails a hapless protagonist will face. Inside Llewyn Davis follows a week in the life of its struggling […]
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God’s Not Dead (PG)
Novelist and career film reviewer, Graham Greene, insisted that any decent critic requires two things to get along in their work: “material for his analysis—for comparison and instruction—and a mind which, however sympathetic, is not prone to quick enthusiasms.“ Many a film, though, has resisted Greene’s ideal critic and opted instead for courting the already […]
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Draft Day (PG-13)
His career has had its ups and downs (i.e. Waterworld), but since 1988, with the release of Bull Durham, Kevin Costner has been the dean of the American sports movie. Whether he is building a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield (Field of Dreams) or making the most remarkable hole-in-twelve at the US […]
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The Grand Budapest Hotel (R)
With special thanks to Jon Paul Pope, who talked this film over with me, helped draw out my own ideas, and whose own ideas are variously represented here. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon says, Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions. These may or […]
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Shane (Not Rated)
Early in Shane, George Stevens’s classic western, the camera takes up the point of view of a boy named Joey (Brandon DeWilde); while trying to set his sight on a buck, he catches a glimpse of an approaching rider. Neither the perspective nor the focus of the film changes much after this. While it might […]
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The Constant Gardener (R)
The name Teresa, or Therese, is common in the recent history of the church. It’s most recognizable bearer is perhaps Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who founded the Missionaries of Charity. This Catholic Congregation, like its founder, is dedicated to the free care of HIV/AIDS suffers, tuberculosis patients, the mentally ill, abandoned children, lepers, refugees, etc. […]
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Catching Fire (PG-13)
On the one hand you have Athanasius contra mundum, and on the other hand, Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong. I’ll confess equal sympathies for both dictums. The Truth is a Man, a single Man, and He does not depend on massive crowds to give Him cultural validity. His cult is the genesis of […]