With Detroit, Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) and her team have put together a kick-in-the-mouth, knock-your-socks-off movie experience you won’t forget in a docudrama staging of the Detroit race-riots of 1967. Starting with a routine police raid of an illegal after hours club where the local residents harass the police as they…
Despite taking place largely in a single location, Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro’s film, Mine, manages to tell a varied story of life experiences, a story that touches on family history, personal regrets and misunderstandings, and even a subtle political critique of US militarism. Playing like a cross between “The Hurt Locker” and “127 Hours,”…
In his powerful and beautifully realized documentary, Tower, Keith Maitland (“A Song For You: The Austin City Limits Story”) movingly recreates the shock and heartbreak of the random shooting of 49 people at the University of Texas in the summer of 1966. The attack was the first mass shooting at any school in the U.S.,…
Pierre Morel certainly knows a thing or two about molding celebrated thespians into B-movie action heroes, having previously kicked off Liam Neeson’s twilight transformation into a growly ass-kicker with the first “Taken” flick, but not everyone can make the transition so smoothly. Sean Penn seems an even unlikelier B-pic headliner than Neeson once was, considering…
American Sniper is more intent on creating a hero out of Chris Kyle, reportedly the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, than it is on being an unbiased character study; to be fair, the film was based on Kyle’s eponymous memoir, which wasn’t the most objective of the Iraq War either. So obviously it…
Intense is one way to describe the trailer for Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. Heartbreaking is another, as we see the incredibly difficult life or death choices left to Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) to make in the theater of war. As with “Lone Survivor,” this film is based on the memoirs of the actual…
Who said Tom Cruise was a has-been? Truthfully, I probably did, but hot off of “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” he’s back in the actioner Jack Reacher. Based on the book “One Shot” by Lee Child, Cruise takes the lead as an ex-cop turned private investigator who gets involved with a murder case involving a…
