A socially awkward, brilliant doctoral student meets the girl of his dreams before facing a life-changing illness in The Theory of Everything. While studying at Cambridge in 1963, 21-year-old Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) had begun to make a mark among both his professors and his peers. He was already showing an academic level of talent that would one […]
An avalanche at a French ski resort threatens to bury a family’s future in Force Majeure. Would you take a bullet for your spouse? Would you hang precariously from a ledge in an attempt to pull your child to safety? Would you stay behind in a fire to make sure that everyone else gets out […]
A rudderless young woman decides to disappear from her own reality in hopes of finding her true calling in Laggies. 10 years after high school, Megan (Keira Knightley) still hasn’t found a way to move on with her life. All of her friends have long since moved on with theirs — getting married, having kids, starting a […]
A brainy young teen, his robot companion and a group of misfit friends form an unlikely clan of crime fighters in the animated adventure Big Hero 6. Hiro Hamada (voiced by Ryan Potter) is a natural whiz at robotics engineering. That’s quite an accomplishment for an otherwise typical 14-year-old boy. He uses his skills to craft […]
After their son is killed in action, his recovering parents welcome one of his team into their home in The Guest. The Peterson family is enduring a tragedy that few of us can begin to truly comprehend and none of us want to experience. Caleb Peterson was killed during a combat mission in Afghanistan. His parents, Laura […]
The curious case of a master forger and the complicated effort to end his deception is the focus of the documentary Art and Craft. For decades, an incredibly talented forger named Mark Landis managed to fool the very best curators at top museums all around the United States, and no one seemed to care. Sporting a frail […]
A once famous, now nearly forgotten, actor struggles to produce a new Broadway show in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Back in the ’80s, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) won the coveted role of iconic superhero Birdman and with it the commensurate fame and fortune of a superstar. Within a few short years, the role also […]
When did horror films become so formulaic and boring? That’s the question that I asked myself — not using a spirit board with a planchette — again and again after seeing Ouija. In particular, I’m sick of the screeching ghosts that serve no purpose other than to make an audience jump. I’m sure that there are examples […]
A gifted young jazz drummer enrolls in a prestigious jazz school where perfection is the only acceptable goal in Whiplash. Renowned drummer Buddy Rich was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Even though I knew nothing about him outside the show, I would always make a point of tuning in whenever he was […]
I have followed the career of Keanu Reeves like most moviegoers from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure to Dracula to Speed through The Matrix and beyond. Hell, the guy even played Siddhartha in Little Buddha for the few of you who actually saw him in that movie. He’s got an impressive list of films. Although […]
A war-weary tank crew takes on desperate Nazi soldiers in the final months of World War II in Fury. George C. Scott played the indomitable and eccentric General George S. Patton in the 1970 film Patton and said, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb […]
A surly, aging curmudgeon becomes an unexpected role model for his sympathetic young neighbor in St. Vincent. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “Into each life some rain must fall.” Vincent McKenna (Bill Murray) would abrasively dismiss such talk as the ramblings of a sorely misguided optimist. The warming rays of sunlight that others claim to find in […]