Whether one thinks Edward Snowden is a patriot or a traitor for revealing CIA and NSA (National Security Agency) secrets will probably not depend on this movie, Snowden, as those who believe one way or the other will still hold those opinions after this 2-hour, 15-minute presentation. Still, director Oliver Stone (“Savages,” but better known…
“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…
When I first saw the trailers for When the Bough Breaks, I was excited. It looked like “Obsessed,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” or “Single White Female,” except with fewer white people (something most movies these days could benefit from). When I first sat down in the theater, I was still excited. The pacing…
The nervous hell of a new job interview is satirized, then sentimentalized, then psychologized in writer/director Anthony Garland’s tonally scattered short Ophelia. The titular character (played with fair restraint by Ali Mueller, “Category 5”) arrives on time in fancy business attire and has only a moment to size up her competition before being called in…
It’s tough to make a religious film in 2016. Not that they aren’t produced anymore, far from it, but that their demographic continues to diminish. An increasingly secularized temperament in the world today means the topic of religion or spirituality in cinema becomes discussed in ever more derisive ways. For audiences, it was difficult to…
“It’s been a while since New York had news this good — especially with an airplane in it.” What if your instincts indicated you were correct, but training, technology and computer evidence proved you were wrong? How would you deal with it? Those are the questions in the newest Clint Eastwood-directed film, Sully, the biopic…
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…
