It isn’t often that the landscape of a motion picture becomes as integral as the acting, writing or direction, but in the newest Ridley Scott (“Prometheus”) outer space adventure, The Martian, the planet’s crimson hues, frozen nights and horrifying sand/dust storms bring the story of an explorer stranded there with little help of survival to…
Four years. That’s a long time to try and survive on a planet that doesn’t sustain human life. But in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, that’s what astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) must do. Based off of the best selling novel by Andy Weir, the stranded scientist has to put to use all knows (and learn…
J. C. Chandor’s New York drama, A Most Violent Year, is a misleadingly titled film, as its timeframe only covers a month and there is very little physical violence. While the title references the exceptionally high crime rate of New York in 1981, the film itself is an intriguing study of different types of violence,…
When I was growing up, reading science fiction from such authors as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke meant discovering new worlds of imagination and wonder. Sadly, what passes for science fiction today is mostly a reflection of a world imprisoned by fear. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a visually thrilling film of…
Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious project yet may be Interstellar. Not just in terms of scope but also in terms of emotion. The Earth is becoming slowly uninhabitable (fires, dust storms, water depletion, etc.) thanks to the hubris of mankind and so now the only recourse is to find a new habitable home . . ….
If a horror film’s story is strong enough, then there is no need for it to resort to “cheap scream” techniques to manipulate the audience. A loud, closing door during a quiet period will elicit the same scream as will a figure walking by a window with a sudden, shrieking violin. There is no earthly…
A cinematic peek behind the curtain of the raid that ended with Osama Bin Laden’s assassination in May 2011 is certainly an intriguing hook for a movie, but it’s far from the whole story that unfolds in Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, taut thriller Zero Dark Thirty. Achieving intimacy in this gigantic narrative about a decade-long manhunt…
