Excerpt: It wrings a surprising amount of depth from its short attention span style, and a surprising amount of empathy from its tale of children whose defining characteristic is that they have no emotions.
Excerpt: …it runs a bit long (and feels it), but Davidson effortlessly carries his character study nestled within a community portrait. This isn’t a laugh-a-minute comedy, instead a dramedy where tattoos both artful and inelegant draw the biggest guffaws.
Excerpt: Although this comedy-drama starring one of our favorite SNL regulars failed to evoke much laughter from my husband and me, we both appreciate the humanity and hope the film offers.
Excerpt: …a gem that thrusts Beharie into a well deserved spotlight and announces Peoples as a filmmaker able to project the way circumstance and community have shaped her protagonist onto the screen and make us invested in her welfare.
Excerpt: A beautiful cinematic experience, delicately subtle and bursting with a gorgeous sense of place and character. There is wonderful intimate suspense in every moment of Nicole Beharie’s performance.
Excerpt: [Despite its] well-worn formula, [the film] still feels fresh thanks to a powerful central performance and authentically lived-in environment.
Excerpt: Casablanca, the 1943 Best Picture Oscar winner. was not very popular at time of release; it was decades later (in the 1960s) that the feature became a cult movie and Bogart became Bogey the International star
Excerpt: A sentimental piece of WWII propaganda, William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver swept the 1942 Oscar Awards, include Best Picture and Best Actress to Greer Garson
Excerpt: Lacking artistic freedom, Pabst may have decided that the best thing he could do would be to smuggle some subversive material into his films, right under the censor’s nose, as some American directors managed to do in the 1950s.
Excerpt: The basic premise of Pat and Mike is very simple—does your significant other (or intended significant other) bring out the best in you? Or does that individual expect you to tamp down the best aspects of yourself, in order to fit into his or her already existing world?
Excerpt: The final solution—most certainly a reversal of fortune—manages to bring the film over the finish line with a final dance and stare from Ollie that offers the hope of a better life ahead.
Excerpt: Carl Reiner has died at age 98 after a warm, inviting comedy career as a writer, director, and actor that stretched from the earliest days of television to political barbs on Twitter. He was a talented and sometimes innovative director with a sketch comedy writer’s gift for affectionate but telling satire.
Excerpt: “Good Trouble” is what Lewis, who proudly recounts having been arrested forty times during the civil rights era and five more during his years in Congress, calls fighting for what’s right. As Porter shows us, it has been the 79 year-old’s defining characteristic.
Excerpt: The arc of John Lewis’s fight for equality and justice is long and shows no signs of slowing down. Director Dawn Porter shows the methods may have changed from the ’60s, but the results are the same – some enjoy rights callously denied to others.
Excerpt: Director Rod Lurie (“The Contender”), a West Point graduate and veteran, pays homage to Bravo Troop 3-61, who would be outnumbered by a factor of over four to one in a position best described as ‘fish in a barrel’ in one of the worst battles of the Afghan War.
Excerpt: The Outpost feels like a war movie classic while simultaneously employing innovative ideas. The visceral performances are unique and combined with the absurdity of COP Keating’s situation, it will leave you with a lasting impression.
Excerpt: Mixing the high stakes, small town politics of “Welcome to Mooseport” with the farmland morals (and sucker punch twist) of …“Promised Land”…“Irresistible” is just too been-there-done-that to have much relevance.
Excerpt: Irresistible is a moderate call to arms amid a growing chasm of right vs. left. There’s an honest appeal for humanity to which writer/director Jon Stewart wishes to aspire.
Excerpt: Gone With the Wind swept the 1939 Oscars, becoming one of the most popular movies ever made. Is the movie racist? kitsch? influential? enjoyable?
Excerpt: The actual production value of the film is its only saving grace. Gone with the Wind is unquestionably a work of art made with considerable talent and quality, but the film is vile and insidious in how it depicts race, the Civil War, and slavery in the Old South.
Excerpt: Politics, both within and without determined why John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley won the 1941 Best Picture Oscar and why Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane was snubbed
Excerpt: Rebecca, the Best Picture Oscar of 1940 is the only Hitchcock movie to win the top award and only one of few thrillers to achieve that (the genre not prestigious enough among Academy voters)
Excerpt: So, leave a little bit of buffer room for surprise, for humanity, for unexpected things to come out. I think that that’s the magic of what is possible with filmmaking.
Excerpt: Gil Junger talked about the pleasures of ignoring the show business adage about never working with children or dogs and how the film is a love letter inspired by his own experience of re-connection to his family.
Excerpt: It’s really important to me that the dog isn’t just staring at its’ trainer the whole time. I told Gabriel he would have to learn to become a trainer as well.
Excerpt: Brian Welsh’s timely film celebrates civil disobedience through a coming-of-age lens at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise and the youngest generation is at the forefront of the human rights battle… The moving, central heartbeat of “Beats” is how Welsh lets us see Spanner through Johnno’s eyes.
Excerpt: Beats captures the highs and lows, the simultaneous hope and desolation, and, most of all, the wild, anarchic freedom of youth and having no idea what you’re doing, but plowing full speed ahead, consequences be damned.
Excerpt: Mixing the high stakes, small town politics of “Welcome to Mooseport” with the farmland morals (and sucker punch twist) of …“Promised Land”…“Irresistible” is just too been-there-done-that to have much relevance.
