September 5 Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Director: Tim Fehlbaum Running Time 95 minutes Rated R Grade B+ Attention history buffs and journalism teachers, while “September 5” might be one of the better-overlooked films this awards season, this prequel to Steven Spielberg‘s “Munich” packs a punch. Tim Fehlbaum’s “September 5” throws […]
There is an apparent reason why you didn’t see Jessica Chastain as a nominee for Best Actress at the Golden Globe Awards last weekend. Why her name also doesn’t appear in the list of nominees for this weekend’s Critics Choice Awards (for which I am a voter). Her latest film “Memory,” which debuted at the
“Children are a crushing responsibility,” Olivia Colman’s character says to a young mother. How “The Lost Daughter” came to be a motion picture is almost as fascinating as the film itself. The mysterious author, Elena Ferrante, is anonymous (her identity and location are unknown). She emailed actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, giving her the rights to turn
You will find more nuance in director Marc Meyers’s previous film, “My Friend Dahmer,” than in his latest, “Human Capital.” The first clue, the screenplay is weak, occurs when virtual strangers meet and instantly become involved in each other’s very separate lives. For the audience, you wonder why we are so focused on Liev Schreiber’s
Despite its title, this film is not essentially about Pablo Escobar; based on the TV anchorwoman Virginia Vallejo’s memoir about her love affair with him, it covers her gradual realization of who he actually was and the ways in which their relationship affected her life. In the beginning, she is so charmed by him and impressed
The South American perspective of Jackie Kennedy is apparently similar to a horror movie seen through the eyes of director Pablo Larraín. In his first English language film, the 40-year-old surprisingly molds Jackie in the same structure of fellow Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001). The vicious editing choices paired with the savage musical
The only thing Antoine Fuqua’s version of “The Magnificent Seven” adds to the slew of remakes that came before is diversity. Based on the original 1954 “Seven Samurai” by Akira Kurosawa, then Americanized into a western in 1960, a sequel in ’72, then a TV-series in 1998, this story has been told to death. Fuqua
Despite giving me flashbacks of similar psychology experiment film Stanford Prison Experiment (and there is no room for two films like this in one year), Experimenter once again takes interesting subject matter, but does everything possible to distract the viewer.
Director Scott Cooper certainly hit the ground running with his directorial debut “Crazy Heart” back in 2009 earning lead actor Jeff Bridges an Academy Award. His sophomore feature “Into the Furnace” in 2013 was hyped as an awards vehicle for lead Christian Bale, but that didn’t pan out so well after people saw the film.