After a disastrous last outing with “Battleship,” Peter Berg, has struck gold with his latest project based on the Navy, Lone Survivor. One part “Black Hawk Down” for patriotism and one part “Saving Private Ryan,” for viscerality, it is an extremely visual, potent film that follows four Navy SEALs who are dropped into Afghanistan to…
Early in 2013, a small film, Adore, based on the novella “The Grandmothers” by Doris Lessing played at the Sundance Film Festival. It screened in limited release in the US in September, and then quietly went to DVD. The film takes on an uncomfortable story of two grown women — the best of childhood friends…
Martin Scorsese seems to subscribe to the belief that age is just a number. Arguably the only one of the 70’s “Movie Brats” who hasn’t completely lost his touch (Spielberg being debatable), he continues to churn out films at a frequency that would exhaust a filmmaker half his age. That said, while his latter-period work…
Like René Clément’s “Forbidden Games,” British director Brian Percival’s The Book Thief focuses on the effect of war on children who are forced by circumstances into coping with events beyond their capacity to understand. Written by Michael Petroni and based on the novel by Australian author Markus Zusak, it is a story told with power…
It always seems like there is always another species trying to take over the world. It’s usually some alien race from some distant galaxy but in Twentieth Century Fox’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes it is home-grown apes. The genetically modified ones we saw get created in “Rise of the Planet of the…
Even bearing in mind that this film was always going to be fighting the uphill battle of the “middle film” curse, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug still didn’t quite live up to expectations. Perhaps it’s because “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” — Peter Jackson’s last “middle film”, from The Lord of…
Cold and distant meets warm and fuzzy in the little Brit pic Philomena and while the odd coupling clearly adheres to the philosophy that opposites attract, the movie is really all about sentimentality with just a side of snark. That snark comes courtesy of recently fired journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, also the script’s co-writer…
