I do not consider this review to have any major spoilers. Nothing I discuss in depth happens after the first 20 or so minutes of the film. These details are also not a surprise to anyone who has a passing…
What is it that has kept us coming back to Shakespeare again and again for centuries? Is it the masterful wordplay? The colorful characters? The layers of meaning and themes interwoven throughout? The structure that binds each play together? Alan…
The Place Beyond the Pines is a linear anthology film telling three distinct chapters in a much looser story about fathers, sons, and personal responsibility. In the first story, professional motorcycle stuntman Luke discovers he has an infant son with…
Trance is the intimate, quiet, and reality-driven companion film to 2010′s Inception. An art auctioneer in London gets pulled into organized crime when he helps steal Goya’s Witches in the Air. He loses all memory of the theft after being…
End of Watch is a documentary-style crime thriller about a tight group of LAPD officers fighting against gang violence. Mexican drug cartels have moved into the neighborhood and violent crime is on the rise. The two main officers, Taylor and…
Stoker is the most beautiful horror film I’ve seen since Three…Extremes (2004/2005 US). Coincidentally, it’s also the first Chan-wook Park film I’ve seen in theaters since Three…Extremes. Park knows how he wants to tell a story and he is not…
Down With Love is over the top, cheesy, and rife with cliches. That’s also the entire point of the film. Writers Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake crafted the skeleton of a throwback Rock Hudson/Doris Day battle of the sexes madcap…
As children, Burt and Anton were picked on mercilessly for being different. They formed a common bond over magic and grew up to become headliners in Las Vegas. They’ve grown to hate each other, but the success of the act…
The push goal I was most excited for when webcomic Penny Arcade went to Kickstarter to go ad-free for a year was their pitch for a new reality show as season four of Penny Arcade: The Series. They would invite…
I’m a big fan of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. I’ve read all of the books multiple times and know the main stories and characters inside and out. There could be a dozen more great Oz films based on the…
A retirement home for professional musicians is in trouble. Almost all of the funds each year come from a huge benefit gala honoring Giuseppe Verdi’s birthday put on by the residents. However, the star performer is unable to perform this…
Last week on Face Off, the eight remaining contestants were paired up to create sci-fi werewolves. They had to use moons of other planets as a jumping off point for an original werewolf design. I’m all for carving a story…
Director Lee Daniels follows up his Academy Award-nominated genre-fluid coming of age masterpiece Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire with the not-Academy Award-nominated genre-fluid pulpy noir psychedelic coming of age crime thriller The Paperboy. The film opens with…
One of the few shining beacons of hope in the found footage deluge after Paranormal Activity was The Last Exorcism. The quiet, unassuming horror film follows a religious con-man who earned his living performing fake exorcisms. He meets his match…