While the subject of Concussion isn’t your typical Hollywood holiday fare, the film nevertheless touches many nerves, spotlights a terrific performance by Will Smith (even though he sports a mostly annoying Nigerian accent throughout) and takes the National Football League to task as the villain it was for many years as it seemingly ignored the…
The power of one man can change the world because he can change the communities around him, one by one. But the power of the community can change the man and the world much faster — for better or for worse — because there’s undeniable strength in numbers while the strength of one can sometimes…
The eponymous academy around which The Atticus Institute revolves, as we are told early on (via ominous letters on the screen, an info-dump technique frequently employed by mockumentary and found footage films), was founded by Dr. Henry West (William Mapother, “I Origins”) in order to study “psi-related phenomena,” such as clairvoyance and telekinesis, until it…
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, twenty-two veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars commit suicide every day, more than die in combat itself. Many more suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and are compelled to take prescription drugs simply to be able to function. Professor Richard Davidson at The Center for Investigating Healthy…
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…
A few years ago, while reviewing Turkish film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2006 great film, “Climates,” I wrote: [quote]“Climates” is a masterpiece, but it is more than that. It is also possibly an augur to even better things cinematically. It is not an overstatement to declare that Ceylan may be the best living filmmaker today….
Even though there are now two films in Guy Ritchie’s vision of the Sherlock Holmes universe (the first aptly titled “Sherlock Holmes“), I am still getting accustomed to the athletic, street fighting Holmes as opposed to the merely cerebral genius who used to chase suspects by horse and buggy rather than bash their brains out…
