Let’s check out the Coen Brothers remake of the 1969 classic True Grit. Like many others I was shocked at this choice by the brothers as it seemed entirely disconnected from everything else they’ve ever done. However, I am a fan of the original and it’s my main connection with the super-stardom aura that was John Wayne. I’ve seen […]

In a mad dash to see just a few more films of 2010 I managed to catch three very strong ones this past weekend. The first film was the dark and foreboding Black Swan staring Natalie Portman along with Mila Kunis and Barbara Hershey. In a bit of unexpected fun the audience sat in the […]

This past Friday I took my son out to see a film I was pretty certain he’d be bored to death with in The King’s Speech. The movie stars Colin Firth as Prince Albert (the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth‘s father) and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, a speech therapist of last resort. Prince Albert suffered for nearly his entire life with a horrible […]

I nearly forgot that I’d seen 127 Hours two weeks ago which isn’t exactly a good omen. The film is based on an actual news story that seemed, to be frank, impossible to make into a movie. It’s about an adventurous mountaineer who, alone in a remote area of Utah, manages to get trapped between […]

Disney‘s 50th animated movie, as the pre-show credits point out, is their latest film Tangled. This is essentially a Disneyfied re-imagining of the Rapunzel fairy tale most popularized by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Disney has a long tradition of taking the basic elements of these stories and recreating them as more interesting family fare as most […]

This week I checked out the documentary film Inside Job about the collapse of the global economy and those responsible for it. The film’s narrated wonderfully by Matt Damon. The story takes us from the very genesis of the issue all the way through the collapse and beyond. Oddly enough it begins in Iceland. It’s […]

I was looking for something a with a bit of a driving pulse and that brings me to Red. It boasts a cadre of capable stars in Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman. The opening credits included a logo for DC Comics suggesting this story is taken from an existing comic but if so I wasn’t aware of it […]

I ended up seeing Nowhere Boy—a biopic on John Lennon that takes us from childhood to his departure for Hamburg where The Beatles honed the skills that soon after brought them to the iconic fame we’re all familiar with. The movie delivers in just the way I think a solid biopic must. It presents a compelling, believable story that infuses […]

I just saw the independent documentary A Film Unfinished. In May of 1942 the Nazis sent a film crew to the infamous Warsaw ghetto they’d created for Polish Jews. For decades that footage stood as a record of life in the ghetto. It depicts contradictions that many felt represented the complexity of living in such […]

I’ve always viewed Facebook as one of those interesting creations that begs the question, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Once you experience these things it’s like wondering how you never connected broad daylight with the appearance of the sun. That said my experience with the service is a bit limited. Just the other day […]

I decided to check out an American remake of a foreign favorite called Let The Right One In and renamed here to Let Me In. The most accurate single word I can use to describe the movie would absolutely have to be “dark”. Everything about this film is dark, subdued, shadowy, etc. It’s essentially the […]

I caught an intriguing documentary today called Catfish. The film included a trailer that essentially left you almost entirely guessing as to its makeup. Watching it you can’t be sure if this is another film in the Blair Witch style, a true documentary, a “mockumentary”, etc. My best guess going in was that it likely […]