Captain America: Civil War Movie Review

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one hell of an impressive machine. It has churned out three Iron Man movies, two Thor movies, a dedicated Hulk movie, two Avengers movies, Ant Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, and now a third Captain America movie (or Avengers depending on how you look at it). Through all of it, the stories have toyed with more important themes and topicality. They have often remained a notch above just popcorn and candy, explosions and mayhem. Now, after lots and lots of catastrophic destruction in the name of heroism and the self-anointed good trying to stymie evil, Captain America: Civil War aims to dive deep on the divide between those who would allow for an unchecked team of independent heroes (or vigilantes, call them what you will) and those who would seek to control them, track them, and direct them in order to minimize collateral damage and tamp down the public belief that these “enhanced individuals” are running roughshod over the globe.

The Impossible Movie Review

Sometimes you have to attempt to erase your preconceived notions of a movie before you go in to see it. With The Impossible, Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s retelling of the true story of a family of five that survived the devastating 2004 tsunami in Thailand, I had plenty. The trailer did the film no favors as far as I was concerned. I made two predictions when I saw the trailer: 1) the film would be an appalling depiction of that terrible tragedy for its focus on a rich white family that made it through while hundreds of thousands of poor dark-skinned people died around them; 2) the film would be a cloying and phony emotional tug at the heartstrings, cynically designed to extract false tears from the audience. I was wrong on the second, but absolutely dead-on accurate on the first.