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…
In case you didn’t find that “Interstellar” pre-chewed all of its own emotions for you enough, Wild, adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” is here to spoon feed you its own derivative “cold mush.” Wild follows Reese Witherspoon (“Mud”), as Cheryl Strayed, on an ambitious and…
In a world where idealism is a scarce commodity, Aaron Swartz stood out. A computer programmer and political and social activist, Aaron had a quaint goal — to make the world a better place, to help us live our lives so that they make a difference. Ultimately, however, though he tried to save the world,…
Watching Siskel and Ebert on television during the 80s and 90s was an important weekly event in my family. Their movie reviews, that included clips from each film, was a learning experience that offered entertaining and insightful opinions as to whether or not a film was worth seeing. Gene Siskel’s death in 1999 felt like…
Foxcatcher, based on the real-life events surrounding the relationship between billionaire John E. du Pont and Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz, is a plodding, tone-deaf snoozer. The cast tries very hard to make things work, sometimes too hard. Even worse, all that made the true story so weirdly compelling in the first place is lost in…
