People who go to flea markets dream of the day that they buy an innocuous painting for $5 that turns out to be a valuable work of art. You hear these stories every year, and other modern equivalents involve treasures found in the contents of houses in estate sales or in storage lockers as seen […]
An eccentric nanny leaves behind a legacy of priceless photographs and endless questions in Finding Vivian Maier. In April 2009, a very tall, 83-year-old woman quietly passed away. No one really knew all that much about her. Two years earlier, a 26-year-old real estate agent, John Maloof, looking for pictures of a local Chicago neighborhood, […]
It’s no secret that I’m underwhelmed by origin stories when it comes to superhero movies. I understand why they exist, and I tolerate them with every reboot of the Spider-Man and Batman franchises. I prefer the films where they assume that you already know something about the characters and just plop them in the middle […]
The controversial former Secretary of Defense sits down for a candid one-on-one interview in The Unknown Known. The administration of President George W. Bush will forever conjure up images of three main players: Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld has a history in politics dating back to the Dwight Eisenhower […]
A couple of young, white-trash lovers from Queens hatch a plot to solve their financial woes by targeting the mafia in Rob the Mob. Here we have one of those true stories that, as the saying goes, you couldn’t make up for fear of being laughed out of town. The story of Thomas Uva (Michael Pitt) […]
A blue macaw and his human owner form an unbreakable bond that’s jeopardized when he’s stolen by smugglers in the animated Rio. Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) is a blue macaw who’s made the most of his coexistence with humans. He and his adoptive owner Linda (Leslie Mann) spend their days in symbiotic bliss. They do […]
There’s a point in the big battle scene in Noah when the giant rock monsters fight the evil human beings and prevent them from reaching the ark. This scene fits right in with any of the entries in the series of movies based on The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Therein lies the […]
A mild-mannered college professor is driven to distraction when he encounters someone who looks exactly like him in Enemy. History professor Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) lives a very mundane, ordered life. Every day is pretty much routine until a colleague recommends a film that sounds curiously compelling to him. Later that evening, Bell is stunned […]
I grew up at the perfect time for the Muppets. I was a child when Sesame Street started airing on PBS, and The Muppet Show came a few years later with a whole new batch of characters that were better in many ways than the iconic creations on Sesame Street. The Muppets jumped to the […]
A melancholy office worker builds a curious relationship with the wife of a man whose lunch he’s mistakenly receiving in The Lunchbox. One of the local traditions to be found in Mumbai are the “dabbawalas,” or the men who deliver round, canister-like lunchboxes that most workers have delivered either from home or from a local […]
A 40-year-old wordsmith enters a national spelling bee by exploiting a loophole in its rules in Bad Words. Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman), an editor with savant-like memory, decides to enroll in the latest Golden Quill spelling bee. Of course, it’s a contest meant for eighth graders, and Guy’s nearly three decades older than the other […]
It’s a testament to the involvement that I felt in a movie about fast cars and racing that I left the theater and found myself pushing a little harder on the gas pedal. I’ll admit that Need for Speed had that effect on me, and so did some of the better movies in this genre, […]