Four simple Aboriginal girls and a washed up former events director team up to create a singing sensation and learn about life in The Sapphires. The year is 1968 and, for decades, the Australian government has oppressed the indigenous native Australians forcing them to live on reserves or missions, denying them proper education and requiring […]
For several weeks (months?) I’ve been acutely aware of the new Hitchcock film starring Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock. Anyone who’s seen a movie lately will know why it’s so easily brought to mind. Hopkins, in full character, has been greeting movie-goers to a funny parody asking people not to text during the movie as […]
Chasing Ice is a film that documents the disappearance of glaciers from key areas around the globe in a way intended to provide real context. Researcher James Balog built a team dubbed Extreme Ice Survey. The team installed cutting-edge time-lapse cameras in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska and Montana. Understand that installation of this equipment is no small task. The […]
A young princess is married-off to a mentally disturbed young king and seeks solace in the arms of her physician in A Royal Affair. I have to admit that I don’t really know much of anything about the broader history of Denmark. In the United States that pretty much means I’m like nearly everyone else. […]
A President struggles with the political and social complexities of freeing an entire race from the shackles of slavery in Lincoln. I never seem to lose the excitement of seeing whatever the latest effort is from uber-director Steven Spielberg. Last year that excitement wasn’t very long-lived, but this year Spielberg has tackled a subject I thought […]
The Sessions is an unlikely tale that combines several aspects that seem completely incompatible and yet weaves it all together to form a beautiful, wonderfully meshed story. This is an autobiographical look at a portion of journalist and poet Mark O’Brien‘s life. One day O’Brien sets a goal to lose his virginity. However, there’s a […]
Ben Affleck directs and stars in Argo: a new film that tells the riveting story of six Americans who escaped the overrun Iranian embassy in 1979 and found themselves trapped in a nation desperate to find and exploit them (or worse). The story is one that’s been around for some time now having been declassified […]
Music is a funny business in many ways. One of the oddities of music revolves around the fickle nature of success. Some musicians are hit the big time while others labor in obscurity. What’s more perplexing is when an artist is relatively unknown in one country while being a virtual superstar in another. Searching for […]
It’s not clear if the story told in The Intouchables is a true story, simply inspired by a true story or a fictional story claiming to be based on a true story but one thing is clear—it’s a charming story. The plot focuses on the coming together of two individuals from entirely dissimilar backgrounds. One […]
In 1994 a 13 year-old boy from San Antonio, Texas goes missing without a trace. The family begins to move on from the tragedy when, more than three years later they get a call that police have found the child alive and, more or less, well in, of all places, Spain. The Imposter is a documentary […]
Last weekend I managed to catch Jack Black‘s latest film, Bernie. It’s the story of a locally-beloved mortician from Carthage, Texas named Bernie Tiede who befriends a local and very rich widow, Marjorie Nugent (played by Shirley MacLaine). Nugent is known throughout the town as a tyrant of the highest order and she’s despised by virtually […]
In what’s likely to be the last film I see from the 2011 slate of films I finally caught My Week with Marilyn. I’ve never been a big fan of Marilyn Monroe. I’ve always found her story to be pitiable and overly hyped simply for the benefit of others. I also was never a big […]