“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”)” — Wilfred Owen In his film “Of Gods and Men,” director Xavier Beauvois tells the story of seven Roman Catholic French Trappist monks kidnapped from their monastery in a village in Algeria by radical Islamists…
Experiencing cabin fever in the generic home invasion thriller Breaking In is the least of the problems that overcome star/co-producer Gabrielle Union’s project as a periled, butt-kicking mother up against brutish home invaders. Although the premise of a bad-ass caretaker defending her children as desperate criminals look to infiltrate the safety of the home presents…
Each time that screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman team up, they create a singular female character that walks onscreen feeling fully formed and armed with lots to say. First it was Ellen Page’s precocious pregnant teen in “Juno,” then it was Charlize Theron’s perpetually perturbed author Mavis Gary in “Young Adult,” and now…
Not since “The Electric Horseman” in 1979 have we had the distinct pleasure of seeing two outstanding actors, Robert Redford (“All Is Lost”), now 81, and Jane Fonda (“Youth”), now 79, working together in the same film. That situation has now changed with the release of Our Souls at Night, directed by Ritesh Batra whose…
“Who are we if we can’t protect them?” Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt, “The Girl on the Train”) asks her husband Lee (John Krasinski, “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi”) in one of the only scenes in A Quiet Place in which dialogue can even be heard. The “them” Evelyn is referring to are her…
Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and Israel’s submission to the 2018 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s (“Lebanon”) brilliant and confounding Foxtrot reveals itself less by narrative than by images: A narrow road in an empty stretch of desert, a lonely camel meandering through a…
As you’ve grown up, have you ever been ostracized from other children, for whatever reason? Maybe you were the kid who smelled, or wore thick glasses. Maybe you simply liked things that weren’t cool enough for elementary school status quo. Children generally have little-to-no sense of empathy when they’re that young, and so school can…
