For eight years, fans of “300” have been wondering how the film would be followed up — could the heroic sacrifice of King Leonidas and his brave 300 Spartans be outdone? With his sophomore effort, Noam Murro (“Smart People”) says, “yeah, kinda,” with his fairly praisable sequel 300: Rise of an Empire. Keeping with the…
There’s not much more frustrating than a film that comes so close to being thought-provoking and perceptive, but chooses instead to focus on apathetic plights and easy solutions. The Monuments Men embodies this all too well, dangling fascinating questions just out of reach, all the while cycling through a series of genre tropes from rousing…
After a disastrous last outing with “Battleship,” Peter Berg, has struck gold with his latest project based on the Navy, Lone Survivor. One part “Black Hawk Down” for patriotism and one part “Saving Private Ryan,” for viscerality, it is an extremely visual, potent film that follows four Navy SEALs who are dropped into Afghanistan to…
Like René Clément’s “Forbidden Games,” British director Brian Percival’s The Book Thief focuses on the effect of war on children who are forced by circumstances into coping with events beyond their capacity to understand. Written by Michael Petroni and based on the novel by Australian author Markus Zusak, it is a story told with power…
Women can be a force to be reckoned with too. In the second trailer for 300: Rise of an Empire that concept is driven home as on both sides of the coin women play a more prominent role. On the side of the Greeks, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) again rouses her countrymen to unite and…
The first taste to the visually stylistic 300: Rise of an Empire, is now available thanks to Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures. In it, Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro again), fresh from his victory against Leonidas in “300,” turns his attention to making the rest of Greece bow to his will. Helping him in this lofty goal…
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…
