Tag: 4 stars
They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those filmmakers whose filmography would be the envy of any amount of unsuccessful but still aspiring young directors struggling to make a name for themselves. His best-known work is 1992’s BELLE EPOQUE which brought him the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film. I admire that film a great deal, […]
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
It is a fact that the two most destructive forces of mankind are greed and racism. These two things have born more chaos and death than any disease or famine that you can name. And yes, It has been, whether we like it or not, part of the make-up of American history almost from the […]
Sidewalk Film Festival Retrospective #4: Gip (2016)
It is not exactly news to report that a very large, significant part of Alabama history is written in the African-American experience. From slavery, through The Civil War, the Jim Crow era, The Civil Rights Years, right up to the current day their often bittersweet history is as much a part of Alabama as the […]
The Jungle Book (2016)
It shouldn’t surprise anyone when Disney shamelessly toots its own horn. The legacy of this paragon of family entertainment has such a rich history and such of wealth of classics to its name that you sort of aren’t surprised to find it congratulating itself. That may come from the fact that recently they’ve been kind […]
Amy (2015)
I have, for a long while, been critical of modern music which to these 40+ ears often sounds like the same song with the same message sung to a different tune. The subject matter treads the safe waters of romantic proclamations and freak-o mating habits with barely a hint of the person behind the lyrics. […]
Room (2015)
The first sounds we hear are breathing. Then a voice whispers “Go back to sleep.” Barely a light reaches the interior of the room and we see expressionist images that are startling; scratches on a wall, a dirty sink, a metal door, eggshells, linoleum, a tiny television set. These things are contained in a space […]
Spotlight (2015)
We have progressed far enough now that we can easily look back at the turn of the millennium with a sense of wonder, reflection and some fear. The clock had barely clicked over into a new century when we found ourselves in a state of panic and paranoia; first Y2K, then a Presidential election that […]