Early in 2013, a small film, Adore, based on the novella “The Grandmothers” by Doris Lessing played at the Sundance Film Festival. It screened in limited release in the US in September, and then quietly went to DVD. The film takes on an uncomfortable story of two grown women — the best of childhood friends…
Walt’s schmaltz, both old and new, is on display in the cute little period piece Saving Mr. Banks, which looks at a particularly bumpy stretch on the Disney-paved road to turning Mary Poppins into a cinematic classic. There’s a war over sentimentality being waged between Disney himself (a warm, welcoming Tom Hanks here) and Mary…
Folk music has been around ever since there have been folks, but the folk revival of the 1960s was due in large part to the increased topicality of the songs and their relevance to the changing times. Though singers such as Joan Baez and Ian & Sylvia among others continued to sing traditional ballads, singer/songwriters…
Martin Scorsese seems to subscribe to the belief that age is just a number. Arguably the only one of the 70’s “Movie Brats” who hasn’t completely lost his touch (Spielberg being debatable), he continues to churn out films at a frequency that would exhaust a filmmaker half his age. That said, while his latter-period work…
Comb-overs, perms, cravats, disco, embezzlement and corruption — American Hustle has it all and then some. And like Scott Cooper’s film, “Out of the Furnace,” David O. Russell’s production features one of the best ensemble casts of the year. And like that movie it too utilizes Christian Bale to its advantage, but this time he…
Ron Burgundy is an idiot. You would know that even if you didn’t see 2004’s “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” because in the push to get people to watch the sequel, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, he demonstrated his idiocy in Durango commercials and every late night talk show that would have him. Reporter,…
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…
