Three sisters: Joy, a flighty hippy chick; Trish, a suburban mother; and Helen, a successful screenwriter. The issue at stake: The ability to forgive and forget. For Joy, the choice is simple. She works with ex-cons, helping them to return to society. She’s even married to an ex-con, a gang member who is trying hard…
When the 2009 Academy Awards happened, there were a lot of shockers. Hurt Locker beating out Avatar, Precious winning best adapted screenplay over Up in the Air. But the biggest shocker for me was the fact that The White Ribbon didn’t win Best Foreign Language Film. I thought the movie was flawless — a masterpiece….
Nominated for an Oscar, winner of a BAFTA, A Prophet tells the story of young Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rehim), jailed for six years, and the amount of growing up he has to do in that time. With an Arabic name, but French allegiance, Malik is alone once inside. He cannot read or write and…
Winter’s Bone is an unflinchingly gritty Neo-noir thriller. From the trailer it looked absolutely stunning and was high on my list of movies to see this year. Now, after seeing it I can tell you that, while it is a fine film, I wasn’t completely bowled over. Winter’s Bone is about 17 year-old Ree (Jennifer…
It is 1910, the last year of Count Lev Nikolayevitch (Leo) Tolstoy’s life. He is 82 years old and his writing days are behind him. His work was so popular that he gained followers — nowadays they’d be called fanboys — who were known as Tolstoyans. One of the main tenets of the Tolstoyans was…
At this point I’ll consider myself a masochist. With a bad taste in my mouth from my viewing of Stoic, I continued on my Uwe Boll obsession and decided to watch his latest film The Final Storm, an apocalyptic thriller which stars Lauren Holly and Steve Bacic as a suburban couple who invite Silas (Luke…
“You are a man with some serious cojones,” one prisoner tells Mitch before hanging him. If I ever have the chance to meet German director Uwe Boll, I’d tell him the same thing, for it’s films like Stoic that require a lot of courage and an abundance of faith in ones trade. Stoic, which marked…
