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…
We all know that, in today’s world, telling the truth may set you free, but it can also make you an inmate or a corpse. Activist folk singer Joan Baez, however, reminds us that, “Courage has to do with being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway.” It is a fitting description of…
Perhaps there’s irony in the fact that it took Disney buying Pixar, sucking the animation giant into the maw of the even bigger animation giant, to jump start the studio’s feature animation production and give it the creative spark that once gave Pixar an arm up on its now parent company. Or perhaps it’s just…
Actor James Newcomb said, “There are individuals who come along in certain periods of time who advance the human spirit to the next level.” Such an individual was Polish violinist Bronsilaw Huberman, recognized, alongside that of Heifetz, Szigetti, and Kreisler, as among the great violin virtuosos of the twentieth century. What is not widely known,…
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…
The Theory of Everything is a powerful, sincere film about one of the twentieth century’s greatest minds. That it never becomes mired in maudlin sentiment is astounding, given the standard succeeding-despite-the-odds story of its legendary subject, the esteemed physicist Stephen Hawking. The leads are more than adequate; they own the roles of Hawking and his…
When I was growing up, reading science fiction from such authors as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke meant discovering new worlds of imagination and wonder. Sadly, what passes for science fiction today is mostly a reflection of a world imprisoned by fear. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a visually thrilling film of…
