Releasing on the heels of one of the country’s most assertive civil rights movements comes Da 5 Bloods, a Spike Lee (“BlacKkKlansman”) joint about one of the most overlooked groups in civil rights history: Black veterans of the Vietnam war. The film seemingly couldn’t have been released at a more relevant time as viewers can…
Waiting for Anya, directed by Ben Cookson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Toby Torlesse, is a film that falls within a popular World War II sub-genre that focuses on a local conflict between German occupiers and French non-combatants, typically set away from the civilian centers that suffered crushing horror, destruction, and death. Based on a…
Cold Blood, by writer-director Frédéric Petitjean, is the assemblage of a lot of good ideas that belong in different movies into one 90-minute feature that couldn’t possibly hope to explore them all properly. What we’re left with is the semblance of movie, the component parts of which are so at odds with each other that…
There have not been many exceptional War War I films save for a handful like “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Grand Illusion,” “Dr. Zhivago,” “Joyeux Noel,” “The White Ribbon,” “Paths of Glory,” “Gallipoli” and “All Quiet on the Western Front” (okay, that may be more than a handful). Recent attempts such as “Flyboys” and “War Horse” and…
If Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, his first film since You Can Count on Me, establishes anything it is that unless we can acknowledge responsibility and forgive ourselves for any real or perceived wrongdoing, we are caught in an endless cycle of denial and recrimination, potentially causing great damage to ourselves and others by internalizing our guilt….
In the early hours of July 17th, 1942, more than 13,000 Jews were taken from their homes in occupied Paris and detained at the Velodrome d’Hiver. They were held there for a few days before being shipped off to a holding site, and finally to the concentration camps, of which only 25 survived. The military…
To be perfectly honest, I don’t think Armored ever had a chance of being a stellar action movie. Ah hell — I don’t think it had a chance of being much of anything. To come to that conclusion all I needed to see were these simple facts: It starred the likes of Laurence Fishburne and…
