If, as the famous line from “Love Story” says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” then Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg), a young couple engaged to be married in a few months, are on the right track. Summer vacationing in the Caucasus Mountains in the Republic of Georgia, Julia Loktev’s…
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…
With more than a passing nod to revenge action films like “The Driver” and “Shooter,” director Niels Arden Oplev (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” original 2009 Swedish-language version) has certainly crafted a gloomy, gritty, violent crime thriller, with some spot-on acting performances, but with a confusing, convoluted plot and a filmed at a deliberate…
L. Frank Baum’s much loved colorful Land of Oz has recently seen a resurgence thanks to the success of the current Broadway show “Wicked.” His novels have also seen many popular film adaptations such as with “Return to Oz” in 1985 and more famously “The Wizard of Oz” back in 1939. Now in 2013, director…
If you want to avoid romantic films filled with all the clichés you can possibly think of and more, you should think twice about seeing Manny Palo’s A Moment in Time. On the other hand, if you choose to skip it, you’ll be missing one of the sweetest, warmest, and most genuine movies of the…
Martin Luther King said, “The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.” Justice has been a long-time coming for Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, three marginalized teenagers wrongfully convicted of the 1993 murders of three eight-year-olds: Steven Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers, found dead in a creek in West…
After enduring a series of movies over the past two months so bad that the word “bad” is woefully inadequate, I thought I might have reached the nadir with such titles as “Playing For Keeps,” “The Last Stand,” “A Good Day to Die Hard,” “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” “Parental Guidance,” and other works of…
