Charles Dickens romances a young, would-be actress who becomes his last great love in The Invisible Woman. In the second half of the 19th Century, Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) was the toast of England (and the world) as its most successful living author. For all the good his fame brought, what it couldn’t elevate was […]
A tactical mission in Afghanistan to eliminate a top Taliban target goes awry in Lone Survivor. On June 11, 1963, a Vietnamese monk sat down at a busy Saigon intersection and chose to be burned alive as a protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. The monk sat motionless while he […]
A lonely introvert finds comfort in the “arms” of his new, highly-advanced cell phone operating system in Her. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is demoralized by the breakup of his marriage to his first love, Catherine (Rooney Mara). It doesn’t help matters that his job as a creative letter writer requires him to be fully in […]
A dysfunctional family gathers together in a time of need, only to find more challenges than answers, in August: Osage County. Many years ago, my grandfather shared with me a key piece of wisdom that, I’m embarrassed to say, I learned far later than I should have. I’d been struggling with some family dynamics, and […]
The only thing worse than a found-footage movie is a sequel to a found-footage movie that strays from the formula that defined the others. It didn’t work with Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, and it certainly fails with Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. For better or worse, the previous four films in this series […]
A highly motivated stockbroker rises from neophyte to Nero in The Wolf of Wall Street. With all the more recent news about Wall Street excess, it’s sometimes easy to forget the myriad of scandals that came before. In the ’80s and ’90s, we had crooks like Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and, of course, the folks […]
A perpetual daydreamer, longing to break free from his mundane life, jumps at an unexpected opportunity in James Thurber‘s classic tale The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) is your typical geeky introvert. He goes through each day wondering what life would be like if only he could escape the chains of […]
Two retired boxing adversaries get one last chance to settle a decades-old grievance in Grudge Match. Thirty years ago, two boxers — Henry “Razor” Sharp (Sylvester Stallone) and Billy “The Kid” McDonnen (Robert De Niro) — faced each other in two monumental matches with each winning one bout. On the eve of the culminating third event, Razor […]
I really like journeys to the past in movies, especially when they stop somewhere in the ‘70s or ‘80s. I’m sure that’s because of my age and my formative years taking place in those decades. (I still can’t imagine life back then or even college without some of the major conveniences like cell phones that […]
A confined cat, desperate to explore his tantalizing surroundings, is waylaid by a perpetual loser in Inside Llewyn Davis. Okay, so that’s not the intended synopsis of the latest Coen Brothers film, but it likely would have made a more entertaining tale than the one they actually produced. This period piece from 1961 features a […]
Two small-time con artists are forced to work for an egocentric FBI agent out to make his mark in American Hustle. It was October of 1972. I was eight years old when a man walked up to me on River Road in Camden, New Jersey. The man asked if I’d like to go to work […]
Iconic studio head Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) needs all the magic he can muster to win the screen rights to Mary Poppins in Saving Mr. Banks. The classic tale of the magical title character comes from a series of best-selling stories by English author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson). Mrs. Travers (as she insisted on being called) […]