I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
“A fulfilled dream is a disappointed dream” — Amos Oz In a quiet moment in Natalie Portman’s (“Knight of Cups”) beautiful and poetic A Tale of Love and Darkness, a mother says to her young son, “If you have to choose between telling a lie or insulting someone, choose to be generous.” When the boy…
The conflict between satisfying one’s emotional needs and doing the right thing is spotlighted in Derek Cianfrance’s (“The Place Beyond the Pines”) intense drama The Light Between Oceans. Set in 1918, the film is based on M.L. Stedman’s debut novel, a work of sparse and understated beauty. Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender, “X-Men: Apocalypse”), a traumatized…
American philosopher William James said that, “Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it.” This statement is especially true for children whose goals and dreams are subject not only to the real problems they face but are in part determined by their parent’s ability to handle…
Winner of two major awards at the 2014 Venice Film Festival and India’s official entry for Best Foreign Film at the 2016 Oscars, 28-year-old Chaitanya Tamhane’s first feature, Court, is not a typical courtroom drama but a devastating look at the failings of the judicial system in India. Portrayed by mostly non-professional actors, the film…
Whether or not space-time is an actual reality or simply an illusion, a convenient concept of the mind to get us through the day, is not relevant here. The Spierig Brothers (“Daybreakers”) mesmerizing film Predestination postulates that it is real, but that is only the starting point of a film that challenges us at every…
According to military historian Antony Beevor, “The subject of the Red Army’s mass rapes in Germany and elsewhere in Europe has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened.” A Soviet war correspondent has said that, “It was an army of rapists,” that Russian soldiers raped every female…
The father of former San Francisco Mayor Jack Shelley once told him, “The day you forget where you came from, you won’t belong where you are.” This advice is not lost on Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn, “Clash of the Titans”), a young woman coming of age in Terence Davies’ (“The Deep Blue Sea”) Sunset Song….
