A lost killer whale adopts a local Vancouver community as its home challenging everything we’ve ever thought about both them and us in The Whale. A two-year-old killer whale swam into Nootka Sound on the western coast of Vancouver Island and emerged alone, far from any other killer whale. This was no typical animal. Luna, as the […]

This weekend I caught a foreign film called Circumstance. It’s the story of two Iranian teenagers who find themselves completely devoted to each other in a country that not only looks down upon lesbian lifestyles but women in general. As you can imagine their path to happiness is beyond rocky. The previews for this film […]

Another weekend seeing two films. This one was the Paul Rudd vehicle Our Idiot Brother. The definition of “comedy” is recorded as: “Professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh.” Using that as a basis for this movie I’d have to say its got major issues. Here we get Rudd as the […]

In what seems to amount to a rare situation this year I managed to catch two films this holiday weekend. I’ve had countless barriers this year to catching more films but the most striking one has been that I just haven’t felt very interested in much of what’s been put forth so far and with […]

An opportunistic Irish cop teams up with a by-the-book FBI agent to go after a local group of drug smugglers in The Guard. This movie, starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle, introduces us to Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), who just happens to be a cop from Ireland. In fact, this is the first oddity of […]

A pure sense of hope against a world filled with callous motivations.

The previews for Super 8 make it crystal clear that Steven Spielberg was involved with the film and suggest he played a pretty big role in every part of its development. The end product, quite heavily, feels as if director J.J. Abrams set out to create an homage to Spielberg with this major release. Many films […]

Woody Allen movies are generally a hit-or-miss affair to the extreme. When they hit they really resonate and create wonderful lasting memories that can be shared with new viewers time and again or even with a bunch who’ve already seen the film a dozen times. When they miss they miss so completely that you wonder […]

On a lazy Sunday with little else out that seemed worthy I decided to give Bridesmaids a shot. Why the reluctance? Well, first of all, I think the star, Kristen Wig is cute but I never found her all that funny on Saturday Night Live. They also tried the bait-and-switch approach I despise by suggesting […]

Apparently from what I’ve heard Water for Elephants is a much-beloved novel that I’m guessing Oprah recommended based on all the women in the theater the day I saw it. Obviously I never read the book but the movie was certainly quite entertaining. I went into it a bit skeptical as circus movies tend to […]

Okay, I got a little behind on some movie reviews so I need to get to these before they’re totally irrelevant. I’ll post them individually just in case I get side-tracked. I caught Jane Eyre. Here’s a classic work of literature that’s been told several times in various forms and I’ve managed to miss them […]

First I need to point out that I never read the book. Second, the theater I saw this at never mentioned it was Part I, of a trilogy no less. Lord of the Rings this isn’t. The film, from an incredibly dense novel from Ayn Rand, revolves around the trials and tribulations of a pair […]