Savages Movie Review

Oliver Stone returns to fine form with his latest example of pushing violence to excess in cinema with Savages, the film that Natural Born Killers might have been with a little restraint. Stone exhibits more control of a story that could very easily have run away from itself and of the violence depicted in it.

A Better Life Movie Review

There’s something about a white director and a white screenwriter making a film about an immigrant Latino family in Los Angeles that doesn’t sit right, like Steven Spielberg or Norman Jewison directing movies about the African-American experience. That director Chris Weitz was able to make such a simple and moving family drama that portrays real characters without resorting to stereotypes shows willingness and empathy on his part to get it right. He could not have been successful without the touching screenplay by Eric Eason from a story by Roger L. Simon and surely it helped that it was financed by smaller independent studios, freeing the filmmakers to work outside the constraints of the studio system that otherwise might have insisted on a story in which a white character achieves self-actualization by helping non-white characters. Not that we’ve seen that before in a popular film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.