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.

Zero Dark Thirty Movie Review

I’m coming at my review of Zero Dark Thirty after it has become a lightning rod for criticism and charges that it depicts torture as having elicited a positive outcome in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, overplaying the role of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” in tracking down the world’s most wanted terrorist. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s defense is as reasonable and accurate as you can get: depiction is not the same as support. But the specific charge is that the story, as laid out in Mark Boal’s screenplay, has the chain of information leading to bin Laden coming from facts gleaned through torture. I recognize this is problematic, made more complicated by the fact that Boal and Bigelow have touted the journalistic nature of the film.

Warrior Movie Review

I might describe Warrior as equal parts Rocky and Miracle. In fact, during the final contest we even hear the sports commentator shout something akin to the famous, “Do you believe in miracles?” spoken by Al Michaels at the close of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” when the USA defeated the Soviet Union in ice hockey in the Lake Placid Olympics. Miracle, based on that event, was also directed by Gavin O’Connor, the helmsman of Warrior.

Animal Kingdom Movie Review: All in the Family

Josh, or J as he is known to family and friends, is a kid trying to survive the harsh circumstances of his life. When we first see him he’s passively watching the television with a passed out woman by his side. The paramedics burst in and ask what she took. “Heroin,” he utters as he continues to pay more attention to the banalities on the idiot box than to his dying mother on the sofa.

If that scene doesn’t jolt you with its impassivity, then the next one almost assuredly will. We see J on the phone saying, “Hi Grandma. Mom’s gone and ODed and she’s died.” When she responds, “Oh, are you all right?” we know everything we need to know about her. We imagine J has lived a grueling existence with a drug addict mother who, it should be noted, kept her son sheltered from his grandmother and uncles. James Frecheville plays him as a kid detached from life trying to find his place in a world that seems to have nothing but cold indifference toward him, a point somewhat clumsily made by the film’s title, Animal Kingdom, and the detective who tries to help him.