The first major Hollywood effort to document Margaret Thatcher’s life made a strategic error. Instead of focusing on the “Iron Lady” kicking butt in the 1980s in the extremely male dominated arena of global politics, The Iron Lady instead chose to focus on Margaret’s mid-stage dementia with haphazard flashbacks to the major themes throughout her [...]

British film director Steve McQueen’s 2008 debut film, Hunger, is notable for many reasons: It is a great film, a great debut film, uses an innovative narrative structure, uses interesting cinematography in concert with its soundtrack, makes the best use of ambient sound to have the best non-musical soundtrack I’ve heard in a long time [...]

Bill Cunningham can’t be bought. He is there to observe and to take pictures, not to consume the fancy meal or mingle with the celebrities; a line which most individuals in his position would most likely blur. Bill has a section of the Sunday New York Times Style section where he will point out a [...]

Fans of David Cronenberg may be at first put off by the pristine stuffiness that envelops A Dangerous Method. While the historical basis for the film is depicted in John Kerr’s “A Most Dangerous Method,” the screenplay has been adapted by Christopher Hampton from his 2002 stage play “The Talking Cure,” and it shows. This [...]

Reflecting both the film’s target audience and the man at the helm (who we can all agree has seen better days), Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar opens with its titular protagonist (Leonardo DiCaprio), loose-skinned, prune-hued, and silver-haired, doing what people his age do: Ranting and raving. In his particular case it is about communism, which he [...]

In the late 1990’s, Sam Childers, a criminal and a member of a notorious Pennsylvania motorcycle gang, decided to change his ways and turned to God for guidance. From that point onwards he devoted his life to helping Sudanese orphans who were suffering at the hands of the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army). The LRA (led [...]

The only person who would have ever thought about making a film documentary of former CIA Director William Colby must be related to him. In fact, his son Carl Colby did just that. William Colby was a driven individual who lived during interesting times and ended up in a fascinating job; however, this does not [...]

Based on the nonfiction book “To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia” by Rick Porrello, Kill the Irishman is a compelling walk through Cleveland’s criminal underbelly during the 1970s and an informative look at a man who brought down the hammer on the mafia’s golden age. To seasoned consumers of gangster movies, [...]

Much like athletes, who run on daily workouts, strict diets, and practice, sports films operate on inspiration. And there’s something about the genre that makes grown men cry their eyes out. Perhaps it’s the machismo, making even the most collected male feel comfortable in shedding a tear or two (definitely more masculine to get emotional [...]

Biker gangs ain’t all bad. Well, actually they are, but not all their members are rotten to the core. Take Sam Childers for instance, the man the new movie Machine Gun Preacher is based upon. Realizing his path in life was off course, he turned his back on a life of crime and turned to [...]

Leaving the cinema after the screening of Senna, the cinephilic documentary of the Formula One driver tragically killed in the prime of his career, I knew I had seen something special. It just took a bit of time to justify, in an articulate manner, just why I had enjoyed it so much. I was impressed [...]

Julie and Julia is Nora Ephorn’s screenplay adaption of two books by two different ladies. In 2002, government employee Julie Powell came up with the idea to begin a food blog that chronicled her challenge of cooking her way through all 524 recipe’s in Julia Childs’ cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 365 [...]

So we’re going with something a little different this week. In what is the first non-fiction film I’ve ever reviewed, Martin Scorsese gets behind the camera to present a part-concert, part-documentary film chronicling two night shows by iconic band The Rolling Stones at the historic Beacon Theatre in New York City. Although the original plan [...]

Not that it matters a whole lot, but I’m going to point out the fact that I recently watched Syriana again — it’s a powerful politically-charged thriller, George Clooney drives the film with an amazing performance and the hyperlinks of the intellectual plot demand viewing with full attention. I believe for those same reasons a [...]

“21 straight lines, five yards apart. That is a football field. But there are other lines you don’t see that run deeper and wider. All the way through the country, and aren’t part of any game.” Those are the lines that Ernie Davis is forced not to cross due to the prevailing attitude of the [...]

Ip Man is still the only martial arts film I’ve ever given a perfect score. Similar films usually throw in those silly bits of humor that come off as lame rather than actually being humorous. It probably hits its target overseas audience well, but the difference in culture probably has something to do with how [...]

This is my first review of a film that I first saw on Netflix, rather than in a theater or on a DVD, and I have to say the service is something of a revolution in how one watches film; or, to be more accurate, in WHAT one watches, for had it not been for [...]

Based on her autobiography, Desert Flower tells the story of fashion model Waris Dirie from her Somalian roots to the cover of Vogue magazine, highlighting the despicable practice of female circumcision that still continues today. This is not an ordinary topic for a biopic; its sinister theme should make the movie unmissable but under inexperienced [...]

Christian Bale has returned to acting! Thank God Almighty! After languishing in barely there roles — growling in the rebooted Batman films and picking a paycheck for Terminator Salvation — Mr. Bale reminded me why he used to be a name that made me want to see whatever movie he was in, regardless of what [...]

What would you do to stay alive? Kill another human being? How about torture and mutilate them horribly? In a much gorified fashion, the Saw series tasked individuals in a “game” with answering these and more damning questions. Breaking away from the simplistic horror angle, Danny Boyle instead ties this question to a harrowing real [...]

I once had the misfortunate of watching a Lifetime television special and because of this I was forced to use a tampon for the rest of the week. Going one step further, Tony Goldwyn’s Conviction, which has been advertised as the perfect Oscar-bait, kicked me square in the balls and sent me straight to menopause. [...]

So I assume that you’ve all seen Mesrine: Killer Instinct and are now anxious to see the conclusion to the series. Luckily, you are not to be disappointed as Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 delivers the same captivating storytelling, magnetic performances, and ace dialog that its predecessor sported. It does, however, lose a bit of focus [...]

Meet Jacques Mesrine: The most notorious French gangster/bank robber in history, who somehow seemed to escape the fame anywhere other than his native homeland. Being a charismatic bloke, he is best described as France’s own John Dillinger, yet, Mesrine, who practiced kidnapping on the side as well, was responsible for the deaths of approximately forty [...]

It is 1910, the last year of Count Lev Nikolayevitch (Leo) Tolstoy’s life. He is 82 years old and his writing days are behind him. His work was so popular that he gained followers — nowadays they’d be called fanboys — who were known as Tolstoyans. One of the main tenets of the Tolstoyans was [...]

The Runaways were a peculiar phenomenon. They were less of a band than a product, and the product they sold was teen rebellion. The five-girl band was fronted by sixteen year old Cherie Currie, Joan Jett was on tousled mop and rhythm guitar, Lita Ford played lead, Sandy West was the drummer, and they had [...]

Clint Eastwood’s latest cinematic opus Invictus meshes the strength and unifying power of sports with the uncertainty of political change. Based on the book “Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation” by John Carlin, Eastwood tries to neatly wrap the tumultuous rise of Nelson Mandela to South African power with [...]

The “Twinkie Defense” (i.e., junk food made me do it) has to rank right up on top of the absurdity chart alongside the “Chewbacca Argument”. The difference between the two: the Chewbacca defense was an extraordinary concept put forth from the minds of the genius creators of South Park. The Twinkie defense, well that was [...]

I realize I’m aging myself here, but I was a teenager in the late 1970′s and as such I wasn’t paying too close attention to what was happening on the political scene at the time. I was much too caught up with the illicit thrill of cutting classes, shopping, and disco dancing. So when David [...]