Sleepless Night Review
RATING: (4 STARS) Better than Bond, better than Bourne, better than Bauer, the new French thriller Sleepless Night sets a new bar for white-knuckle action movies. Taking place over a 24-hour period and primarily in one giant nightclub, the film is intense in ways no other has been in years. Vincent (Tomer Sisley) and his […]
Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie Review
“Is this a passing fancy or is this in front of the wave?†Former Today Show host Bryant Gumbel asked this of rabble-rouser extraordinaire Morton Downey Jr. sometime during his meteoric rise to the top of syndicated television. The quote very appropriately concludes this exceptionally entertaining documentary chronicling Downey’s life and career, and its answer […]
Side by Side
One wouldn’t necessarily expect Keanu Reeves to be as much an expert on the art of filmmaking as folks like James Cameron, George Lucas, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, David Lynch, Danny Boyle, Steven Soderbergh, and Martin Scorsese, but in the documentary Side by Side, he’s a very knowledgable window into the artistic and technical processes […]
Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story
The story behind Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story begins in the intensely racially segregated South of 1965. An NBC News documentarian named Frank DeFelitta went to Greenwood, Mississippi to gently prod its residents on the subjects of race and racism. He ended up turning a black waiter, Booker Wright, into an “accidental activist,” when he […]
The Revisionaries
Anyone who’s watched The Daily Show or The Colbert Report knows there’s a humorous side to even the most poisonous political battles. In The Revisionaries, director Scott Thurman skewers the Texas State Board of Education in a similar vein and to great effect. Unless you’re a “young-earth creationist” like board member Don McLeroy (pictured above), […]
The Five-Year Engagement Review
RATING: (2.5 STARS) A group of people sit in a room with a box of stale doughnuts. They’re told to eat if they wish, but fresher doughnuts are only 20 minutes away if they’d like to wait for something better. Will they really come? It’s up to each individual to decide, but needless to say, […]
The Giant Mechanical Man Review
RATING: (2 STARS) Calling Lee Kirk’s The Giant Mechanical Man slight would be a massive understatement. It’s infinitesimal. It focuses on two kindly individuals going through pre-mid-life mid-life crises. That’s a subject certainly worthy of the screen, but any film this formulaic just isn’t. The characters are flat and frustrating, the beats are totally predictable, […]
The Russian Winter
John Forte was once on top of the music world, helping write and produce songs on The Fugees tremendous, Grammy-winning album The Score. Just a few years later, however, Forte was arrested and sentenced to 14 years in prison for cocaine trafficking. In 2008, his sentence was commuted by President Bush, and though he’s still […]
Babygirl Review
RATING: (2.5 STARS) As a coming-of-age story, Macdara Vallely’s Babygirl is quite successful. Front and center in the film is Yainis Ynoa, an attractive young talent whose Lena is equal parts street smart and naive. These characteristics help her navigate the tricky waters of the Bronx where her mother’s boyfriend lusts after her while she […]
Town of Runners
Who knew the world capital of running was the small rural village of Bekoji, Ethiopia? In Town of Runners, documentarian Jerry Rothwell takes us to this place, where the roads are made of mud, where phones have yet to be introduced, and where children know their only chance at a future outside Bekoji is through […]
Death of a Superhero Review
RATING: (2.5 STARS) For a few wonderful minutes in Death of a Superhero, it appears we’re in for something truly inspired. Films with dying characters trying to complete one final task or fulfill their last wish all play out the same way, but Ian Fitzgibbon’s film appears cut from a totally different cloth. Unfortunately, it […]
