They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for April, 2014
Blue Ruin (2014)
John Saulnier’s Blue Ruin is a joy to anyone who is utterly bored with the Hollywood revenge fantasy of Jason Bourne and the ridiculous Taken series with Liam Neeson. While those movies are disposable fantasy, Saulneir’s film is about the messy, bloody business of revenge as it might happen to the ordinary person next door […]
Heaven Is for Real (2014)
The greatest relief of the new Christian-based drama Heaven is for Real is that it tells a story with a Christian message without embarrassing God. Unlike the awful God’s Not Dead, which pasted its message to your forehead with thumbtacks, here is a film with good acting, and a true mystery about the existence of […]
Great Films: Rebecca (1940)
On the surface, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca seems inorganic to the rest of his work. True, its slow pace and gothic tone are a little jarring after you’ve seen North By Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho and Notorious, but here is a film that can’t be discounted. It is the most somber of his works and, in the […]
Devil’s Knot (2014)
Atom Egoyan’s Devil’s Knot is wholly unnecessary. Here is a fictionalized recreation of the brutal 1993 murders of three elementary school boys from West Memphis, Arkansas that has already been documented to death, first in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s brilliant 1996 documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and then in […]
The Machine (2014)
I can’t get anywhere without my GPS. I’m told that I am “directionally challenged.” I depend on my cell phone for so much that I could be accused leaving normal functions to wires and microchips. When I get home, I spend a majority of my time on the computer. I don’t think I’m alone. This […]
Living Things (2014)
Eric Shapiro’s Living Things is an exhausting experience, and that’s a good thing. There are no car chases, no gun battles, no cacophony of sound design. Here is a movie that is constructed almost entirely out of words. It contains only two actors, seated at a dinner table debating each other for just over an […]
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
I’ll be honest, I haven’t always been kind to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that opened with 2008’s Iron Man. Save for the original Iron Man and Captain America: The First Avenger, the films in this series have been, for me, a case of noisy fan gratification, with more posturing then pondering. Don’t get me wrong, […]
God’s Not Dead (2014)
God’s Not Dead is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Here is a movie that buries itself in the guise of a “Christian film” which suggesting that if you’re not a practicing Christian – if you’re an athiest or an agnostic or a Muslim – that your life is an unhappy slog of misery, bitterness and […]
