The great American poet Emily Dickinson wrote: “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality.” Whether or not Dickinson stopped for life, it kindly stopped for her and her immortality is enshrined in the legacy of the 1800 exquisite poems she left, only…
Fear that your children may mimic your worst qualities is the driving force in Hirokazu Koreeda’s (“Our Little Sister”) After the Storm (Umi yori mo mada fukaku), a compassionate look at the struggles of a Japanese family. Its title derived from the lyrics of an old pop song, the film is set in Kiyose, a…
There exists no alternative in critiquing James Steven Sadwith’s Coming Through the Rye without first discussing the novel which both its title and story derives from. Personally speaking, I never finished reading The Catcher in the Rye. Despite the national uproar that the novel stirred by its addition to school curriculums in the United States,…
If there was ever a case of “too little, too late,” it would be Goosebumps, released by Sony Pictures Entertainment under its Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation labels. And, not unlike “The Simpsons Movie” in 2007, this picture should have come out at least 15 years earlier. “Carpe diem” or “strike when the iron…
Phobias. They affect millions of people on a daily basis. Some, like the fear of the dark, public speaking and spiders, can be sympathized with. But having a fear of just about everything, up to and including laundromats? Well, that’s downright crazy, and Jack (Simon Pegg, “The World’s End”), the man who suffers from said…
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…
Let’s not mince words here: Sinister scared the fucking shit out of me, and that is not an accolade I hand out lightly. It’s rare to stumble upon a truly scary movie in this day and age; the horror genre has grown stale of late, with filmmakers constantly wasting our time with predictable jump scares…
