![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() Descendents descend from families. The Descendants is about concentric families in crisis: an exploding nuclear family, a feuding extended family, an enduring multigenerational family. They all center on George Clooney’s reluctant patriarch, the trustee of a landed Hawaiian dynasty. Cloone…
WikChip Image
A family rediscovers paradise. Aloha.
|
||||||
![]() Boyhood is the first Great American Movie of 2014. It profiles the emergence of a slacker, delivered as the insightful backstory of an aimless guy who ends up haunting the streets of Austin. Through that Texan lens, the great Richard Linklater has created a transcendent portrait of 21st century…
WikChip Image
The Linklater Family Values Players
|
||||||
![]() Halfway through this crowd-pleasing movie, a senior citizen in the row behind us blurted out “This is a very good movie.” He’s right, albeit his exclamation is more telling than intended, as it conveys The Judge’s appeal to middle-agers of Robert Downey Jr’s generation and especially to those o…
WikChip Image
The Moviestars Are The Thing.
|
||||||
![]() Interstellar is stellar: long yet engaging, showy yet substantial. Most of all it’s conceptually creative and consummately mounted, the former because of its theoretical physics underpinnings and deep humanity, the latter because of Christopher Nolan’s visual derring-do and Mathew McConaughey’s…
WikChip Image
Daddy-Daughter Issues: They've got a ...
|
||||||
![]() More cringe-worthy than laugh inducing, Daddy’s Home is barely worth passing the time on a long flight. Bottom-line: one LOL and some grins aren’t enough to rescue this mean-spirited Will Ferrell comedy. SEQUEL NOTE: Daddy’s Home 2…
|
||||||
![]() Newton Knight is a newly essential Matthew McConaughey role that finally knights Newt Knight as a true American hero. Even more, Free State of Jones is an only-in-America story, so corny it could only be true. A deeply moral white man frees enslaved blacks and marries a black woman during the C…
WikChip Video
CBS Sunday Morning feature on Newt Kn...
|
||||||
![]() Why don’t slaves revolt? In the South two centuries ago, in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust or even in Asia now? The Birth of a Nation helps answer that complicated question. Unfortunately the movie itself is complicated. Its creators apparently raped a woman while college students in 19…
WikChip Image
Nate Parker's movie: engaging & affec...
|
||||||
![]() Reality TV has become ever more pervasive since The Truman Show wowed everyone in 1998. Fortunately, none have made an unwitting dupe the star of the show for the first thirty years of his life. Notwithstanding that such a thing would be impossible, it got explored in Peter Weir’s great film of…
WikChip Video
Retrieved from the cutting room floor
|
||||||
![]() Behind every successful man is a strong woman, three in the case of John Glenn and the Mercury Seven astronauts — strong black women in fact, smart too, very smart. Hidden Figures smartly tells their tale, a can’t-miss concoction of civil rights, space race and romantic drama. Lots of star powe…
WikChip Video
Great Women. Great Americans. Great M...
|
||||||
![]() Get Out melds edgy African-American humor with classic horror movie tropes, the admixture delivered with near Hitchcockian mastery. That’s how Jordan Peele’s brilliant movie brings the Black Lives Matter sensibility to horrific life. The conceit is not that whites don’t care if blacks live or d…
WikChip Video
The multifaceted Mr. Peele
|