God + Country (2024)
I have been very quick to knock any [...]
Tag: 3-and-a-half
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Times being what they are, it was impossible for me to sit through Captain America: Civil War without comparing it to that other comic book conflict movie that bowed six weeks ago. Where that movie was a clunky, misguided, unhappy mess, the latest Captain America movie has its head on straight, it tells a good […]
Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
Nostalgia these days is a dime a dozen. Go to your local retail store and you can see that it has practically become a cottage industry. It doesn’t take much to make nostalgia into a visual feast, but it takes a steady hand to give you the pure feel for something that takes you back. […]
Zootopia (2016)
The greatest joy of going to the movies, for me, is the joy of discovering something that the filmmakers have worked to turn into something special. Week after week, I attend the Hollywood product that regurgitates shopworn plots and tired characters that aren’t much deeper than your average rain puddle. Yet, every once in a […]
Hail, Caesar! (2016)
One of the things that you start to notice after you’ve taken several of the journeys of Joel and Ethan Coen is that often when you get to the end you’ve sort of arrived back at the beginning. Little headway has been made though a few lessons have been learned. There is a glorious life-goes-on-quality […]
The Hunting Ground (2015)
It is clear that filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering want to make you made, get you riled up, and call you to action. They seem to know and understand the importance of Howard Beale’s famous proclamation in the movie Network that “First, you’ve got to get mad!” That was the tone of their 2013 […]
When Marnie Was There (2015)
I ask you not to let the following sentence push you away because if it does, you’ll be missing something special. There is a pall of sadness that persists throughout the animated drama When Marnie Was There, for several different very distinct reasons. This is a perfectly modulated drama about the search for personal identity, […]
The Revenant (2015)
There are people in my day-to-day life whose day is ruined if they can’t get to Starbucks. For them, I highly recommend The Revenant, a brutal 19th century wilderness adventure in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a fur tracker who, in the course of this film, is twice mauled by a bear; crawls out of his […]
Steve Jobs (2015)
There was a time when, upon leaving the house, I never walked out without my wallet and my keys. After the revolution of Steve Jobs, it grew to include my iPod which contains not only my music but also podcasts, lectures, documentaries and anything else that makes the drollery of my drive to work into […]
