The Infiltrator Movie Review

The world surely has no shortage of movies about the international drug trade or about law enforcement using everything in their arsenal to take down the cartels. There’s also plenty of movies about the perils of going undercover to take down a criminal organization. The Infiltrator combines both for a premise that is not especially original, but which is often enthralling. There’s something about the story of a person who goes into another world pretending to be something they’re not. There’s the adrenaline rush of going into the danger zone. There’s the excitement of getting to be someone else for a while leading a sort of double life. It’s like getting a chance to be someone and do something that you’re not. Who wouldn’t like the opportunity to see how that fits? Of course who wants to take with it the possibility of getting killed?

Midnight Special Movie Review

The enticement of big studio backing, larger budgets, and wider distribution must be great to successful indie filmmakers. Jeff Nichols had a string of well-received films that did well on the festival circuit and then got a lot more money for his fourth feature, Midnight Special. Unlike what often happens with directors who display talent on the small scale, Nichols didn’t move on to the latest superhero movie or some other blockbuster. Instead he took the money to make his own story and make it without the limitations he surely faced in the past due to budget constraints.

Heat Movie Review

It’s sort of improbable that Michael Mann was able to make Heat the way he wanted to at the length of nearly three hours. How did a studio greenlight that decision? Mann was not a known director like a Scorsese or a Spielberg. Crime drama was not exactly a genre that typically lent itself to epic scope and length. I can only surmise that it was on the strength of having Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as the two leads that made executives believe that people would come to this movie. It didn’t hurt, I’m sure, that the movie is exceptionally well-made.

Dough Movie Review

It feels almost obscene to speak negatively of a film like Dough. It has only the best intentions. It is not malicious and takes on several noble subjects that are both particular to its London setting as well as universal in the multicultural 21^st century.

Jonathan Pryce is a wonderful actor who has made a career of flying just under the radar of superstardom. Here he plays Nat Dayan, proprietor of a kosher bakery that is on the brink of failure alongside the corporate one-stop shopping convenience next door. He’s hardly recognizable behind a thick beard and gristled locks of hair, and a yarmulke. Nat clings to an old way of life in which the family business passes from father to son and the Jewish community thrives in perpetuity. But time marches on and change comes. His son became a successful lawyer and the Jews are fleeing (most likely to the suburbs as they earn their continued financial successes), being replaced by immigrants and refugees, many of them African Muslims.

Purple Rain Movie Review

The sudden death of the enigmatic celebrity, the electrifying performer, the virtuoso musician Prince made me jump immediately to a movie I’d never seen before. Purple Rain was Prince’s first movie. He starred in it and of course wrote all the music that his character, The Kid (a somewhat autobiographical version of himself), performs. He won an Oscar for Best Original Musical – the last time that Oscar category was even awarded. Purple Rain has never a bright reputation. It’s no work of cinematic gold and is only remembered today because it stars Prince and his music. By most accounts, it is the best of Prince’s four films so I can only imagine just how bad Under the Cherry Moon must be.

Woman in Gold Movie Review

I’m a big “West Wing” fan, so excuse me if you don’t know what I’m referring to when I say, “Crime. Boy, I don’t know.” That is a line from “Posse Comitatus,” the season 3 finale and the lynchpin moment when President Bartlett decides he’s going to take it to his opponent in the election. Woman in Gold is the Holocaust equivalent of that sentiment, an empty gesture at acknowledging something inexplicably awful.

Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Rocky

It’s easy to forget after the deluge of increasingly absurd sequels through the 80s that Rocky – the original – as not only a great film, but is raw and gritty. I guess because I grew up on the sequels, the whole of the series sits in my memory as polished Hollywood filmmaking. And I even watched Rocky ten or fifteen years ago!

The movie truly feels like something out of another era. It’s low-budget, it’s seedy and dirty. Interestingly, I watched John Huston’s Fat City for the first time last year. That’s another 70s boxing flock that predates Rocky by a few years. I remember thinking how gritty it looked and felt and was shocked to find how similar the pacing and look of Rocky (at least in the first three quarters or so is to Huston’s film. I wonder if it was viewed by director John Avildsen and cinematographer James Crabe to achieve a real brown street look.

Spotlight Movie Review

Thankfully after the sour taste of Truth, a journalism movie with good intentions but very poor execution and understanding of proper journalism, Spotlight came along to remind us that there are people who get it. They get that investigative journalism can be a tool and a force for change and for good and that the ends in themselves are not always justified even if your story is right, or is most likely right. Good journalism requires good, fair, and accurate reporting. It’s about dogged determination in getting people to talk or reveal secrets. Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy and co-written by him and Josh Singer, sis the best movie about the process of investigation and what goes into reporting a story since All the President’s Men.

Straight Outta Compton Movie Review

I fail to see what all the fuss and accolades toward Straight Outta Compton is about. Yes, it’s a good movie, well written and acted with a cast of mostly unknown and inexperienced actors. But as a musical biopic, what does it really bring to the table that hasn’t been done countless times before?

The story of the rise of the rap group N.W.A. from a group of friends making music together to a national voice for the powerless inner city black youths in America and FBI pariah is certainly not uninteresting. We’ve all heard of Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. This is where they got their start. Eric “Easy-E” Wright died twenty years ago while DJ Yella and MC Wren are the lesser known members of the group. That Dre and Cube worked as producers on the project should not go unmentioned because it’s pretty clear in the film’s narrative which characters are highlighted most prominently. It’s also worth pointing out that their characters come off as the most morally upstanding while Eric Wright, no longer alive to defend himself, comes across (in spite of a lovely redemption at the end) as the instigator of strife within the group.

A War Movie Review

The Danish entry and nominee for this year’s Foreign Language Film Oscar is A War written and directed by Tobias Lindholm. This is one of the more unusual foreign films you’ll see in that it more closely resembles a Hollywood film than most. It’s easy to forget that American soldiers haven’t been the only ones doing the fighting and dying in Afghanistan. A coalition of many nations sent soldiers there and A War is about a company of Danish men and women patrolling the countryside and villages to keep the Taliban at bay.

Southpaw Movie Review

Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw is a little chaotically scripted by Kurt Sutter with plot points that are occasionally unbelievable, nonsensical, or irrelevant, but it is Fuqua’s most restrained directing effort I can recall and contains enough moral uplift that it just crosses the line of what’s worth watching as a minor diversion.

Jake Gyllenhaal is impressive as Billy Hope, the light heavyweight champion of the world. Hope (and Gyllenhaal by extension) is physically imposing with a ripped torso and biceps. He has an anger control problem that remains mostly confined to the ring. So that he garners our sympathies, he’s got a beautiful wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), and daughter, both of whom he adores and dotes on. Maureen doesn’t want him to keep fighting because his style allows him to endure punch after punch until he’s angry enough to pummel his opponent. His manager (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) wants him to sign a three fight deal.

Phoenix Movie Review

There’s a current movement in German cinema. I’m not sure if it’s acquired a catchy name yet. “The Berlin School” is the closest I can find, but that’s not descriptive in the way that “film noir, “French New Wave,” or “Italian neo-realism” were. From my own observations it’s something like neo-German historical realism. But that’s a little clunky. At any rate, the movies, which tend to focus on post-war Germany or Communist Bloc East Germany, have been making their way stateside, illuminating the ways in which a new generation of German filmmakers and their audiences are responding to the important historical markers that shaped Gemany and its people today.

Irrational Man Movie Review: Woody Allen's 45th Feature

Correction 10 August 2016 - I originally labeled this as Allen's 50th feature. I think I pulled that number from a crude count of his IMDb credits which include TV work and one of the three vignettes in New York Stories. This was actually his 45th theatrically released feature film as a director, including What's Up, Tiger Lily?

Abe and Jill accidentally overhear a troubling story in a diner.

I’ve thought Woody Allen was washed up and done as a filmmaker for almost twenty years, but then every now and then he throws a curve ball of Vicky Christina Barcelona or Midnight in Paris, so I’m not about to make any big pronouncements, but Irrational Man is one that makes me desperately hope he doesn’t close out his career now lest the stink linger forever. That’s not really fair, I guess. No matter how bad an artist’s latter-day sins might be, the great stuff will always maintain a redemptive quality. Just look at Stevie Wonder.

Fat City Movie Review

From the annals of long since forgotten films comes Fat City from 1972. Every calendar year is overloaded with movie releases that, even if modestly successful at the time, are destined to recede into memory as the years pass. The status of classic or cult classic is reserved fro only a handful of films each year. You need only go back eighteen years to find a Best Picture nominee called The Full Monty, for example. It was a small British film that found great success in the United States. But how many people think of it now? How highly regarded is it by those who do recall it? Now consider that film’s status with another twenty-five years of age. So The Full Monty is no Fat City, of course, if for no other reason than the latter was directed by John Huston, a Hollywood legend. But even his fame never elevated the film above the level of New Wave Hollywood footnote.

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.

Maps to the Stars Movie Review

David Cronenberg’s films have always been a bit of an acquired taste. If you can bear sitting through stories about emotionally and (often) physically scarred people who continue to be tortured by and torture themselves over their trauma, and you like it all presented in the harsh cold of the distance the filmmaker puts between his audience and the film’s subjects, then you might keep returning to his work. His films are rarely short of intriguing and boundary-pushing. At least it was through his first two decades or so. It’s getting harder and harder to shock people. Once you’ve done exploding heads, nude bathhouse knife fights, and people whose sexual fetish involves car crashes, where is there room for turning stomachs? His recent spate of work resides in a heightened glossy reality. He had a mainstream renaissance with A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Those two are among the most accessible pieces in his body of work, but they still require a suspension of conventional expectations.

Danny Collins Movie Review

There’s hardly a more heartbreaking story of a once great acting talent becoming a washed-up caricature of bombast and overacting than Al Pacino. He was such a marvel in the 70’s. He was good-looking with the most expressive eyes of any actor of his generation. His delivery was subtle and always perfect. When I look at him now, I don’t even see the same man. His sad hangdog face obscures the depths that used to reside within. Every now and then, as in Donnie Brasco, he has flashes of greatness once again. Some have been giving similar accolades for his latest, a heartfelt story of redemption called Danny Collins, written and directed by Dan Fogelman.

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.

Tangerines Movie Review

Update 21 April 2015: This film was released commercially in the United States on 17 April 2015.

This film has not yet been released commercially in the United States.

Anti-war movies so often fail at being effectively anti-war because any depiction of fighting, violence, brutality, or death inherently glorifies it by making it sensational. One of the best anti-war movies I can recall is Danis Tanovic’s Oscar-winning No Man’s Land which featured virtually no fighting at all but was about two wounded soldiers from opposing sides in the Bosnian War stuck in the tract of land between the lines. It was about the absurdity and ineffectiveness of war and the need for human understanding in conflict. No Man’s Land was the movie I thought of most often during Tangerines, one of this year’s nominees for the award that Tanovic’s film won.

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.