Set in Communist East Germany in the early 1980s, cold war paranoia is in full view in Christian Petzold’s Barbara, winner of the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale. In Barbara, Petzold has fashioned not only a superb character study but a film that illuminates the effects of oppression on the human…
Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School, published a provocative article in 2008 in the British Medical Journal, titled “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network.” In it he states, “Happiness is more contagious than previously thought . . . Emotions have a collective existence — they are…
Thrust to the screen in choppy black and white footage is the deployment of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Enola Gay in 1945. What ensues is mayhem and the emergence of a death-gripping mushroom cloud. Next, there’s a second of deafening silence before the screen is flooded with the blustering sounds of…
With more than a passing nod to revenge action films like “The Driver” and “Shooter,” director Niels Arden Oplev (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” original 2009 Swedish-language version) has certainly crafted a gloomy, gritty, violent crime thriller, with some spot-on acting performances, but with a confusing, convoluted plot and a filmed at a deliberate…
If you want to avoid romantic films filled with all the clichés you can possibly think of and more, you should think twice about seeing Manny Palo’s A Moment in Time. On the other hand, if you choose to skip it, you’ll be missing one of the sweetest, warmest, and most genuine movies of the…
The newest “fairy tale epic” production, Jack the Giant Slayer, when compared to others of its genre, fits neatly beneath “The Brothers Grimm,” above “Snow White and the Huntsman (thanks to the presence of British actors and the absence of Kristin Stewart) and FAR above last month’s travesty, “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.” It is…
If the “Twilight” series had dialogue as witty and snappy as Beautiful Creatures, it would not be the target of so many jokes and eye rolls. Here we have another film with supernatural beings, but this time, we get witches and warlocks instead of vampires or zombies. There are teenagers involved; therefore, stay tuned for…
