Set in Communist East Germany in the early 1980s, cold war paranoia is in full view in Christian Petzold’s Barbara, winner of the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale. In Barbara, Petzold has fashioned not only a superb character study but a film that illuminates the effects of oppression on the human…
DreamWorks Animation, often the poor stepbrother to Pixar, has had a pretty good run over the past two years with “Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” and “Rise of the Guardians.” That trend continues with The Croods, a wild, colorful tale about the end of the Neanderthals, continental drift, plate tectonics and…
U.S. Presidents have not always fared so well in Hollywood over the years. After all, Franchot Tone died of cancer in “Advise and Consent” (1962), Henry Fonda had to deal with the Reds blowing up everything in “Fail-Safe” (1964) and Fredric March was weakened and almost overthrown that same year in “Seven Days in May.”…
Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School, published a provocative article in 2008 in the British Medical Journal, titled “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network.” In it he states, “Happiness is more contagious than previously thought . . . Emotions have a collective existence — they are…
I’ve seen enough documentaries, especially those that regularly stream on Netflix, to recognize the hallmarks of what I can only label “vanity documentaries,” in the manner that the term vanity has been applied to subsidy presses. By this I mean that the filmmaker is an amateur — often wealthy, with too much time on their…
Jaded as I am regarding cinema of this sort, I have to admit that this newest release had me for about 75 percent of its short 95-minute running time. The conclusion, however, taken right from “The Silence of the Lambs,” left a bitter taste. Not enough to pan the entire enterprise, but well, there’s that…
I am happy to announce that The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is the best comedy of 2013. Of course, that’s not saying very much considering that comedies released this year have included “Identity Thief,” “Parental Guidance,” “The Guilt Trip” and “21 and Over,” among others, and that JFK’s memorial service would have been funnier by comparison….
