There’s walking in circles and then there’s walking in circles the Paul Thomas Anderson way. Whatever that means. Not that it matters. Who cares, anyway? A flippant attitude for a flippant movie. Except that Inherent Vice, Anderson’s latest and possibly his worst, is 150 minutes of flippancy, a wacky stumble into safe, though awfully off-putting…
There is a sub-genre of the war film that focuses on those away from combat. These films do not display the horrors of warfare or the camaraderie of men under fire, but instead the dramas of those left behind or serving their country behind the lines. Such a film is Testament of Youth, based on…
It’s hard to say how much art there is in imitation, but Angelina Jolie certainly apes the old-fashioned Hollywood tear-jerking biopic like the best of them. Whatever that’s worth is where the debate lies in Unbroken, Jolie’s second feature-length directorial effort and a true story of a triumphing American if ever there was one. A…
American Sniper is more intent on creating a hero out of Chris Kyle, reportedly the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, than it is on being an unbiased character study; to be fair, the film was based on Kyle’s eponymous memoir, which wasn’t the most objective of the Iraq War either. So obviously it…
“Sometimes, it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one imagines” Mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing experiences both triumph and tragedy in Norwegian director Morton Tydlum’s The Imitation Game, the true story of a man whose help in breaking the Nazi’s Enigma Code during World War II may…
Thirteen years after Peter Jackson first introduced us to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we find ourselves at the conclusion of the prequel Hobbit trilogy, and thus our last foray into Middle Earth. As a result, cinemas are bound to be packed with fans both fierce and casual, all reluctantly saying farewell…
The climax of “Divergent” that saw the young divergent Tris (Shailene Woodley) escape with her life after a face-off with the manipulative leader of the Erudites (Kate Winslet) may have been anti-climatic but that won’t keep a good YA series from marching on. Realizing there is more to her story in this post-apocalyptic Chicago, in…
