Rudy, a gay female impersonator (played by Alan Cumming) has his life turned 180 degrees unexpectedly when he ventures into his neighbor’s abandoned apartment to turn down the endlessly playing (and loud) radio only to find her Down Syndrome-suffering child Marco sitting there left all alone. This story, supposedly based on true events (though I […]

There was something in the previews of Life of Pi that kept me from rushing to see it. To be honest, it looked a bit too fantastical for my tastes. I saw it last night and now lament every single day of having not experienced this wondrous story. The film is about Pi Patel—now older—telling […]

I feel cheated. The previews for Anna Karenina did absolutely nothing to prepare me for the unique approach of this telling of the famous Leo Tolstoy story—and I suspect this was very much on purpose. Many people are probably familiar with the tale as there have been decades of books movies, plays and more. However, […]

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 […]

Denzel Washington stars in a new film as a heroic but troubled airline captain in Flight. This is a film that manages to effectively blend a first-rate thriller and a compelling drama into one fluid story line that will have most viewers glued to the edge of their seats throughout. The film really takes place […]

Cloud Atlas is a tale of six different time periods and people that connect each period together—or at least I think that’s the idea. This is an epic film with an epic tale and an epic cast that epically failed to interest me for more than a few minutes of its nearly-epic three hour running […]

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 […]

Every so often a movie will come along that captivates movie reviewers and the statements you read about it make you wonder if, perhaps, someone at my theater switched it out for some inferior test version. Looper is a perfect example of that. This time-travel film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe (everyone in the film […]

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is based on the best-selling novel by Stephen Chbosky. The people I saw it with had heard of the book but hadn’t read it. I had no idea about its origin so I went into the story entirely cold. I didn’t expect much based on the previews I’d seen […]

Richard Gere is back with a new film called Arbitrage. Gere plays a business tycoon/wheeler-dealer who seems to be the darling of Wall Street but, like many such perspectives of recent years, appearances can be deceiving—and so can Gere’s character. The real draw of the film is in the evil way it brings us into […]