With Detroit, Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) and her team have put together a kick-in-the-mouth, knock-your-socks-off movie experience you won’t forget in a docudrama staging of the Detroit race-riots of 1967. Starting with a routine police raid of an illegal after hours club where the local residents harass the police as they…
Inspirational dramas are inherently uplifting, motivational and psychologically gripping. Their feel-good elements or inevitable triumph-into-tragedy climaxes are the functional foundations behind rewarding, emotionally-charged cinema. However, tear-jerking tales of adversity sometimes often fall into the realm of derivative dramatics that register in mawkishness despite their well-intentional pursuit of truthful sentimentality. Writer-director T.C. Christensen’s (“The Cokeville Miracle”)…
For a British voter and cinemagoer, it is a singular experience to see a film about Winston Churchill in the aftermath of a general election. The film is especially distinctive in 2017, as the British government displays all manner of contradictions and at times inadequacies, whereas Churchill, both the film and the legend of the…
There are good musical biopics (“Love and Mercy,” “Walk the Line,” “La Bamba,” “Straight Outta Compton”) and there are bad ones (“Jolson Sings Again,” “The Doors,” “Great Balls of Fire!,” “Notorious”), and there are solid, but mediocre presentations like the latest, All Eyez On Me. Directed by Benny Boom (“Next Day Air”), All Eyez On…
Movies have been telling stories about dogs in the military since Rin Tin Tin starred in silent films like “A Dog of the Regiment” way back in the 1920s. Those were made-up stories that turned “Rinny” into one of Hollywood’s biggest money-makers of the pre-sound era (supposedly even getting him the most votes for Best…
Planes, running and Tom Cruise — three ingredients for a possible a box-office hit converge one more time in American Made, an action-comedy-thriller based on the life of Barry Seal, former pilot for TWA and drug smuggler for Pablo Escobar. It does not take long into this first trailer for chaos to brew with Seal,…
Nowadays, we could probably use all the knowledge and understanding of mental illness that we can possibly obtain, so Cyrus Trafford’s well-intentioned short film, The Voice in the Head, certainly has something meaningful to offer. The 12-minute piece uses a young woman’s final exam essay question in a psychology class to probe our perception of…
