Title Tws summary Trust ▲ Year Viewable | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Denzel Washington as a badass CIA agent gone rogue is reason enough to watch Safe House. Good thing, since the rest of the movie is just OK: weakly acted aside from the superstar, ridiculously plotted, unconvincingly over-the-top in its action. Plus it’s consumed with a WikiLeak-like passion …
WikChip Image
Summa Cum Laude Movie-star Charisma
|
||||||
This magnificent political biography also happens to be a very good movie. Not a great movie, but a great and important story, well told and even better acted by its two leads. Lessons in history and leadership should all be so charismatic. The movie has rhythms and totems unfamiliar to Amer…
WikChip Image
American superstars as African heroes
|
||||||
Essential though Patton may be – as war movie, as American history, as biopic – it’s not the epochal statement the Academy thought they were canonizing with seven Oscars in 1971, including Best Picture. Back then Frances Ford Coppola’s script seemed subversive, undermining American militarism …
WikChip Image
If I had my way, I'd meet Rommel F2F.
|
||||||
The tangled web of deception surrounding James Bond reaches its nexus in Spectre, a more than serviceable installment in the Blond Bond Era. Daniel Craig’s 007 is once again a stone-cold assassin, reprising the gritty killer persona he established in Casino Royale and has doggedly pursued in …
WikChip Video
Monica Bellucci is spectacular.
|
||||||
Aquaman is a whole lotta waterlogged cheese, almost 2½ hours worth. It’s not a bad movie and certainly an OK time at the movies, but is kinda turgid, as DC movies so often are. Fortunately, the cast saves the day, starting with Jason Momoa, who makes a compelling superhero, if not an especial…
WikChip Video
Easter Eggs for those who want more
|
||||||
Best. Mission: Impossible. Ever. Please Mr. Cruise, can we have another? Rogue Nation succeeds spectacularly well from the opening credits till the closing line, the very iconification of extremely entertaining action-movie hyper-reality. This fifth M:I movie is the first to envelope …
WikChip Image
Great Casting: CIA Chief Alec Baldwin
|
||||||
Casablanca it’s not, but Allied is a damn good romantic thriller set in WWII Casablanca, or at least initially set there. Most of the movie then takes place in London during the blitz, with Brad Pitt’s proto-007 thrust into domestic espionage against his wife, played by Marion Cotillard. It’s…
WikChip Video
Brad, Marion & Zemeckis talk Allied
|
||||||
Why did Exodus – the ultimate big-screen Passover story – premiere right before the start of Hanukkah? Obtuse timing aside, Ridley Scott has wrought a magnificent Biblical epic in Gods and Kings, the best of the year, if not the millennium, and as thoughtful an action movie as you’ll ever exp…
WikChip Image
Moses our Teacher as Action Hero
|
||||||
Tom Hanks has his best role in years as Captain Rich Phillips, yet ends up second banana to the U.S. Navy in general and the SEALs in particular. The combined effect elevates Captain Phillips to true greatness. That it is also the rare history lesson delivered while still current elevates it …
WikChip Image
The real Captain Phillips in the inset
|
||||||
The 2012 Islamist militia attack on the two U.S. outposts in Benghazi Libya comes alive as a colossal and utterly predictable central-government failure in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Truth! The amazing thing is that only four men died, even if one was Ambassador Chris Stevens…
WikChip Video
Gold Star Parents react to 13 Hours
|