I love movies that take me someplace that I will never go or introduce a lifestyle that is markedly foreign because I can take that journey from the comfort of a theater seat. Fill the Void is that type of movie because it sets things firmly in an ultra-Orthodox community in Tel Aviv for a […]
A young Hasidic Israeli girl has to balance her dreams and desires against the pressures of her family and faith in Fill the Void. This is the film that represented the country at this year’s Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film — though it didn’t win. The film is written by Rama Burshtein, a native New York […]
Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel head to a party at James Franco‘s new house and and up smack in the middle of Armageddon in the irreverent comedy This Is The End. Seth Rogen and friends have a long history of over-the-top films that revel in the most base levels of juvenile male humor. This Is […]
When the Apocalypse comes, I want to stay as far away as possible from the Hollywood mansion of James Franco. It’s one thing to watch it up on the silver screen, but it’s another thing entirely to live it. Fortunately, I had the luxury of sitting in a movie theater in which the worst thing […]
Like many people, I first heard about WikiLeaks when they released classified documents about U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010. In the midst of the hullabaloo, two men became prominent for their activities. WikiLeaks founder/spokesman Julian Assange defended the release of the material, and Bradley Manning later emerged as the U.S. Army source of the documents […]
If assassins ever come to my house to kill me, I hope that they do it quickly and without me knowing about it in advance. I’d rather be surprised and moving on to the next world — where I hopefully have plenty of time to watch movies and play games — than stuck here dealing with an […]
A freshly-recruited agent from a top-flight private intelligence company goes deep undercover to infiltrate an eco-terrorist group in The East. Relative newcomer Brit Marling, last seen as the daughter in Arbitrage and also the recent The Company You Keep, stars as an undercover agent named Sarah who is assigned by her boss (Patricia Clarkson) to gain the trust […]
Will Smith costars with his son Jaden Smith as a father and son trapped on a hostile world in the futuristic sci-fi adventure After Earth. A thousands years have passed since humans were forced to leave Earth and establish a new colony on another planet. The problem is that the planet they’ve chosen, called Nova Prime, is […]
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson team up once again to play two laid-off watch salesmen desperate to find a meaningful job in The Internship. Billy McMahon (Vaughn) and Nick Campbell (Wilson) were riding high as top sales reps for a big-ticket watch company when they suddenly find themselves without a job, without a market and […]
There are a few people whom I would kill if given an opportunity, but I’ll keep that to myself just in case the events of The Purge come to pass in another decade. Set in a dystopian future where America treats crime in an entirely different method, this movie tries hard to establish a premise […]
Three 15-year-olds spend their summer building a makeshift house in the woods and find themselves along the way in the coming-of-age tale The Kings of Summer. Back in 1979, my closest friends and I scoured the landscape to collect every type of building material we could get our hands on. The goal was to build […]
The new film Now You See Me starts off with a wonderful opening scene involving some great examples of the craft in a real-world setting. We meet four solo — but very talented — magicians who each use magic for their own personal gain until, one day, they’re compelled to come together for the biggest feat of […]