I absolutely loved The Meyerowitz Stories, but this doesn’t surprise me, as I’m obsessed with all of the movies that writer/director Noah Baumbach has been responsible for, with personal favourites including The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, and While We’re Young. He’s an auteur in the truest sense of the word; all of his films…
A Serious Man could have been called A Private Man. Because that’s what this film is – private. It’s the sort of movie that only gets made by a powerful entity, in this case, the Coen brothers. Hot off the Oscar and commercial success of No Country for Old Men, they followed up with the…
The Lovers is basically a perfect movie, at least from where I sit on the couch and watch movies. Everything clicked into high-gear with this one, from the skillful leading performances by Debra Winger and Tracy Letts, to the observant writing and patient direction from Azazel Jacobs, who after some sterling work on HBO’s underrated…
Our Souls at Night is a thoroughly lovely film that feels as if it could have been made 20 years ago at the studio level, but now because we live in a movie-world where the studios don’t care about this sort of low-key, adult-minded material, Netflix is here to save the day and continue to…
Stronger, the new film from screenwriter John Pollono and director David Gordon Green, is currently playing in cinemas and focuses on the life of Boston Marathon bombing survivor Jeff Bauman, who lost both of his legs below the knee on that tragic day in 2013. Played in a riveting and inspiring performance by Jake Gyllenhaal,…
The mega-entertaining and extremely photogenic new documentary Let’s Play Two chronicles the 2016 Chicago Cubs championship season and a pair of concert performances put on by legendary rock band Pearl Jam. Guitarist Eddie Vedder, a Chicago native, and the rest of the band warmly embraced world-renowned photographer/director Danny Clinch and the results are visually stunning…
Stronger is emotionally potent true-life cinema, a cautiously inspiring film about grotesque physical and mental tragedy, and a film that resists easy sentimentality which would have cheapened the overall package. Directed with a strong sense of focus by the eclectic filmmaker David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Snow Angels, Joe), the film was written by first-time…
This movie is cold, hard, steely, lethal, terse, and most especially – REAL. This may well be the last, truly great car-chase movie, if for no other reason than the fact that almost every single bit of action was done on location, by real stunt men and women driving actual cars on actual city-streets and…
Andrew Niccol is a very smart guy. He wrote The Truman Show, the first draft of The Terminal for The Beard, and wrote and directed the supreme sci-fi noir Gattaca, which has to be one of the most prescient pieces of entertainment of the last 20 years. In 2005, he released Lord of War, which…
It’s true that Francis Ford Coppola had a rough time after the first two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, but that’s not to say that the films that would follow would all be without merit or importance. 1988’s deeply underrated Tucker: The Man and His Dream deserved to do better than it did at the…
Damn. Shot Caller is a piece of hard-as-nails cinema. I’d love to see the expression on Walter Hill’s face after viewing this testosterone drenched display of movie machismo; the fact that it’s basically air-tight from a conceptual level only helps to make the film feel all the more spectacular overall. Written and directed by Ric…
Trainspotting 2 (I simply refuse to refer to this film as T2 as there is only ONE T2) works way better than I ever expected. I am very wary of long-lead sequels, especially sequels to masterworks, so this one had a lot to prove. The story is really good, the performances are all excellent, it’s…
Tonight’s feature presentation is one of my all-time favourites from childhood, the 1986 family movie SpaceCamp, which is finally hitting Blu-ray later this year courtesy of those wonderful people at Kino Lorber. I watched this movie 8,458 times while growing up, endlessly hoping that somehow, someday, I’d end up in a space ship. It was…
The charming, offbeat indie Dave Made a Maze is one of those efforts that truly feels hand-made and the product of a filmmaker who had a very specific vision and a very specific way of realizing that vision. Directed by Bill Watterson from a script he co-wrote with Steven Sears, this quirky and unconventional piece…
I can remember seeing Steven Soderbergh’s sad, romantic, and often times thought provoking science fiction film Solaris on opening weekend at the Arclight in Hollywood back in 2002, and as I recall, I seemed to be one of the only people in that theater who enjoyed what they’d seen. I’m not sure what people were…
File this one under “IT WOULD NEVER BE MADE TODAY.” Totally awesome and completely irresponsible, the 1984 children’s fantasy action film Cloak & Dagger was a staple item of my HBO-watching youth, and I can remember literally exhausting the family VHS copy after my mom taped it off the movie channel. Directed by Richard Franklin…
