There’s walking in circles and then there’s walking in circles the Paul Thomas Anderson way. Whatever that means. Not that it matters. Who cares, anyway? A flippant attitude for a flippant movie. Except that Inherent Vice, Anderson’s latest and possibly his worst, is 150 minutes of flippancy, a wacky stumble into safe, though awfully off-putting…
The eponymous academy around which The Atticus Institute revolves, as we are told early on (via ominous letters on the screen, an info-dump technique frequently employed by mockumentary and found footage films), was founded by Dr. Henry West (William Mapother, “I Origins”) in order to study “psi-related phenomena,” such as clairvoyance and telekinesis, until it…
From its first scene of dialogue, older Italian men with permanent scowls etched into their world weary faces mumbling to each other in a Brooklyn bar, Zarra’s Law reads like a mob movie made by someone who wants to imitate the genre but doesn’t speak a word of English. For a significant portion of the…
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,…
There is a sub-genre of the war film that focuses on those away from combat. These films do not display the horrors of warfare or the camaraderie of men under fire, but instead the dramas of those left behind or serving their country behind the lines. Such a film is Testament of Youth, based on…
The great African-American poet Langston Hughes in his poem, “As I Grew Older” asks us to help him find his dream. “Help me to shatter this darkness,” he asks “to smash this night, to break this shadow into a thousand lights of sun, into a thousand whirling dreams of sun.” Though for many minorities, the…
It’s hard to say how much art there is in imitation, but Angelina Jolie certainly apes the old-fashioned Hollywood tear-jerking biopic like the best of them. Whatever that’s worth is where the debate lies in Unbroken, Jolie’s second feature-length directorial effort and a true story of a triumphing American if ever there was one. A…
