If life is up and down with a few bumps along the way, what better representation is there than a cable car’s ride up and down a mountain? This particular cable car ride takes place in the riveting documentary Manakamana, a ride that brings passengers, both foreign and local, to the Manakamana Temple in the…
So it turns out that sixty years prior to Mel Brook’s epic 80s run of classics, Buster Keaton was busy beating him to the parodic punch. Keaton’s brand of physical gag comedy has always been wildly distinctive and brilliant, but his work is not generally so focused on the specific spoof. That brand of comedy…
Fairy tale revisionism has run rampant across screens of late, so with the marketplace heavily saturated, there’s no better time to revive Stephen Sondheim’s subversive musical “Into the Woods,” about a convergence of fairy tale characters discovering what lies on either side of happily ever after. Sondheim’s playful lyrics and rich humor ensure that his…
For years now, Tim Burton has seemingly lost the ability to surprise. So his latest picture succeeds on that modest level by actually being somewhat decent. Big Eyes, a strange true story about deceit in the world of art and marriage, is hardly Burton at his best, but it’s certainly Burton at his most enjoyable…
Mike Leigh’s film Mr. Turner centers on the last twenty-five years of the life of the acclaimed 19th century English landscape painter, J.M.W. Turner. Though the film, with the strong assistance of cinematographer Dick Pope, succeeds in capturing the look and feel of the time as well as the essence of Turner’s beautiful landscapes and…
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…
“Sometimes, it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one imagines” Mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing experiences both triumph and tragedy in Norwegian director Morton Tydlum’s The Imitation Game, the true story of a man whose help in breaking the Nazi’s Enigma Code during World War II may…
