American Sniper Movie Review

A Navy SEAL sniper sits on the roof of a building in Iraq. In the street below is an American military convoy. His job is to shepherd those soldiers to safety by keeping a lookout for potential threats. In the city war zone that has been evacuated, any military-age male must be regarded as a threat. First he scopes a man talking on a cell phone. The man steps inside, not knowing how close he came to losing his life. Next a woman and a boy, not more than eleven or twelve years old, arrive on the street. She hands the boy a rocket-propelled grenade. The voice on the other end of the soldier’s com can’t confirm visually. The call is entirely his. Men who engage in war are fair targets. What do you do about a child who is about to kill your comrades?

Selma Movie Review

Upon a second viewing of last year’s Selma, Ava DuVernay’s film about Martin Luther King and his leading the protests in Selma, Alabama, that would ultimately lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I have warmed up to it more than when I first saw it. There was some outspoken backlash bout the Academy’s failure to nominate DuVernay for an Oscar. The same for David Oyelowo, who portrays King and carries the movie through most of its emotional highs and lows. The paltry number of nominations (a Best Picture nod and one for Best Song for which it won) was attributed by some to Hollywood’s refusal to accept black stories or to afford them the same status as stories about white people. These were rich arguments coming the year after 12 Years a Slave won the Best Picture Oscar. That film was about a challenging as they come. No, I think Selma was little recognized in the awards season because it simply wasn’t as good as other movies last year. Unless people believe in affirmative action for movie awards, I see no reason Selma and its director should have bumped other worthy nominees from their recognition.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I Movie Review

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I has an unwieldy title thanks to the decision long ago to divide the third book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy into two movies. Let’s face it, this is a business decision much more than an artistic choice. It’s a means o doubling revenue for a single story. I feel no discussion of this series can be complete without considering that decision.

The Judge Movie Review

The Judge, directed by David Dobkin from a screenplay by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque, is a perfect example of soft, flat, non-challenging, placating material that is made to appeal to a demographic of people who watch movie as a means of sedation. Because it stars two very fine actors in Robert Duvall and Robert Downey, Jr., and because it’s a courtroom drama, it is easily digestible to the broadest possible audience.

St. Vincent Movie Review

Bill Murray has had a late stage career renaissance playing curmudgeonly irritated men whose bitterness and sarcasm masks some deep loss within. It started with Rushmore and found one of its greatest expressions in Lost in Translation. It reaches a nadir in Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent which has Murray playing the title character who is anything but a saint.

Vincent is a rude misanthropic angry man with a ramshackle house that’s falling apart, a car that isn’t doing much better, a healthy drinking problem, and a penchant for gambling as a means of increasing his debs and chances of getting broken kneecaps from his loan shark Zucko (Terrence Howard). Oh, and his best friend is Daka, a pregnant prostitute stripper (Naomi Watts, sporting a cartoonish Russian accent) whose employment options are limited to men who find her belly a turn-on.

A Walk Among the Tombstones Movie Review

Played in all earnestness as a tribute to the private investigator sub-genre of crime fiction, Scott Frank’s adaptation (which he also directed) of Lawrence Block’s A Walk Among the Tombstones is about as grim and nihilistic a treatment as you’re likely to see in a mainstream movie. The character Matt Scudder featured in more than a dozen of Block’s books and some of those have been adapted to the screen before. But Frank, who is no stranger to pulp fiction and mystery stories involving a tough PI (Frank wrote the screenplay adaptations of both Get Shorty and Out of Sight), doesn’t bother trying to reinvent the genre or to put a new spin on it. A Walk Among the Tombstones is effective classic mystery storytelling. It’s more hard-edged and just plain evil than any adaptation of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade ever was, but the hallmarks are there.

Top Ten of 2014

I guess I'm just about ready to call my best movies of 2014. It's far beyond the end of last year, but I'm only just now in a place where I feel comfortable enough that I've seen most of the movies that would be likely to make my list.
This is one of the strangest top ten lists I've ever made. I don't think I've ever had two documentaries on the list. And as you get into the second half of my list, it's populated by films that I am less enthusiastic about than I am in admiration of. In years past it was a struggle to not leave a movie I really enjoyed off my list. This year it was about struggling to include something worthy. 2014 left me feeling chilly. There wasn't much I really went wild for.

10. The Babadook - directed by Jennifer Kent - Certainly not one of the absolute best of the year and not even one of the greatest scary films or thrillers of all time, but supremely effective and left me chilled to the bone about the psychological horrors of parenting and losing your mind.

We Are the Best! Movie Review

Swedish director Lukas Moodysson went a little dark after his light and free-wheeling feature debut Together, one of my favorite movies from 2001. He came back last year with We Are the Best, another film similar in tone and just as light on its feet. It’s amazing to see a director as comfortable dealing with high energy electrifying characters as he is with moody depression. In his latest he tells an adorable story, adapted from his wife Coco’s comic book about three young girls in Stockholm in the early eighties trying to stand out as punks. The punk movement was on its way out by then and of course girls weren’t supposed to care. But Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and her best friend Klara (Mira Grosin) are the school’s outliers, two kids who spike their short hair and dress alternatively. And they catch hell for it from their peers.

Oscar-nominated Documentary Short Films Review

The Oscar-nominated documentary short program is an interesting crop of selections this year. Four of the five nominees are simply documents of a particular subject, be it place, character, or family. Only one has what could be construed as having an agenda, or attempting to call attention to an issue and even that example is a restrained portrait of the subject matter.

In White Earth, Christian Jensen goes to a small town in North Dakota where the population has swollen due to recent oil drilling. People are showing up from all over the country hoping for a better life for their families through more work. Rather than focus on the nefariousness of oil companies, or the blight on the land that the drills cause, Jensen talks to the children of oil workers about how they feel about the work, their town, and their future. It’s only twenty minutes, so it doesn’t go deep. The film presents a snapshot of a town and some of its people. The images are occasionally beautiful, scattered though they are throughout. The result is a simple document of family life, parenting, and the desire to see your children have a better life.

Still Alice Movie Review

For movies about terminally or debilitatingly ill characters, you could do a lot worse than Still Alice. Adapted and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland from the book by Lisa Genova, it’s about a woman diagnosed with and then suffering the consequences of early onset Alzheimer’s. She’s only fifty, still working as a university lecturer, giving talks around the world on linguistics and language development. She’s still physically active as a runner and involved in her children’s lives. They are at that precarious age in between childhood and having families of their own, chronologically adults, but still in need of mother’s care.

Unbroken Movie Review

I was afraid Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s second outing behind the camera, would be tacky, maudlin, and sentimental hokum. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong. The story of Louis Zamperini was bought by Universal many years ago and finally put into production after Laura Hillenbrand’s book on the subject became a best seller. Zamperini was an American Olympic runner who competed in the 5,000 meter run at the 1936 Berlin games and then flew bombing missions over Japan during WWII. He was shot down over the Pacific, survived for an astounding 45 days adrift on a raft with two other crew from his plane, was picked up by a Japanese ship and placed in a prison camp where he endured brutal conditions and regular beatings at the hands of a pettily jealous guard.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Movie Review

For the third and final installment in Peter Jackson’s bloated trilogy, The Hobbit, I couldn’t bear to sit through An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug to refresh my memory before trudging through the morass of The Battle of the Five Armies. The predictable result is that I had completely forgotten who some secondary characters were, what they had done previously, and why I should care about them at all.

Love Is Strange Movie Review

What a beautiful little movie Ira Sachs made with Love Is Strange. Alfred Molina and John Lithgow play George and Ben, a same sex couple who get married (thanks to a change in New York law) after almost forty years together as partners. George, who works as a music educator in a private Catholic school, is fired for not upholding the values of the Church. Essentially, his marriage stands in conflict with the public image of the Church. The decision is not unlike any company firing someone for publicly engaging in a behavior that reflects poorly on company values. However, his colleagues and most of his students and their parents knew he was gay and lived with Ben.

Last Days in Vietnam Movie Review

Though it’s not the most exciting or ground-breaking documentary you’ll see, Rory Kennedy has made one of the more solid, interesting, and important entries in the 2014 crop of award-winning documentaries. Last Days in Vietnam focuses on the final days of the war between North and South Vietnam, long after the U.S. had pulled all troops off the ground and the Paris Peace Accords had been signed. After President Nixon resigned, the North Vietnamese army began advancing in violation of the agreement. This documentary is about the effort to evacuate the American Embassy in Saigon including all Americans on the ground. A lot of Americans also had Vietnamese wives and children to evacuate. Then a simple evacuation turned into a massive humanitarian effort to extract tens of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who might end up imprisoned or executed if left behind.

Virunga Movie Review

Orlando von Einsiedel’s documentary Virunga has a special way of pulling you into one story and then ripping the rug right from under you and slamming you with a story you weren’t expecting. He begins with a prologue detailing, very briefly, the torrid history of the Congo, its struggles to free itself from colonialism, and then to embrace democracy. The next half hour or so introduces the UNESCO World Heritage site Virunga National Park, a stunning paradise and bio-diverse nature preserve that is home to the last remaining mountain gorillas, which happen to be the emotional lynchpin of the film.

A Most Violent Year Movie Review

Abel Morales is a Latin American immigrant in New York City in 1981. He owns and operates his own heating oil business amid a social and business landscape that is in decay. Corruption in his industry is rampant to the point that the Assistant D.A. (David Oyelowo) is lumping him in with all oil companies in an investigation. The city itself is witnessing its most violent time ever. The radio news is constantly recounting the previous day’s tally of violent crimes, a heavy load weighing the city down along with the cold wintry mood set by director J.C. Chandor and his production designer John Goldsmith and cinematographer Bradford Young.

Foxcatcher Movie Review

One of the lesser known footnotes to modern Olympic history is the relationship of John Du Pont to the Olympic wrestling gold medalist brothers Mark and Dave Schultz. It’s a funny thing that no one pays much attention to the sport of wrestling outside of the quadrennial Olympic cycle, but there’s something so quintessentially American about the sport Of course it’s been around since the ancient games of Greece and eastern Europeans often excel at it, but the American ideal is intrinsically bound to it. It’s a sport based on physical confrontation one-on-one. You succeed based on your own abilities. It is a total make-it-or-break-it scenario. It’s about a fiercely intense combination of brute strength and cunning strategic skills. You have to be tough and strong, but also to outwit your opponent.

The Imitation Game Movie Review

Maybe I’m just not easily impressed anymore. Maybe it’s because I rarely see any of the really bad movies anymore and so by comparison, the stuff that is really good seems so ordinary. The Imitation Game is supposed to be one of the year’s best movies, but it is so utterly conventional, I just found it sort of dull. This is the story of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped decode the messages churned out by Enigma, the Nazis’ communication device, which should be a ripe subject for a fascinating story. The machine Turing developed to break the code laid the foundation for modern computing.

Citizenfour Movie Review

It’s not very often I get turned around on an issue from a documentary film. I didn’t think much about Edward Snowden when his name was big in the news for revealing that the NSA was collecting data on everyone’s phone calls and emails. It struck me as suspicious that, of all places, he wound up in Russia, after first spending significant time in China. Was some foreign government supporting him? And why? I thought, at the very least, he had committed a crime by leaking classified documents. Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizenfour allows us to spend lots of time with him, giving us the sense of really getting to know the man and make a decision for ourselves about him.

Citizen Koch Movie Review

My personal politics are irrelevant when it comes to evaluating a movie. At least I do my best to make it so. Of course sometimes you can’t help it. Doing my best to look objectively at Citizen Koch, the documentary by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin about the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission on American politics, I would say this is a film that fails to thoroughly examine the very issue it claims to be about.

The Citizens United case, as you may or may not know, was the 5-4 split decision that essentially ruled that, when it comes to campaign contributions, corporations are individuals protected by the First Amendment. The result of that decision has been the funneling of enormous amount of corporate money into political actions.