It’s 1942 and World War II is raging almost everywhere on the planet. Allied spy Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) parachutes into occupied French Moroccan city of Casablanca. His mission: assassinate the Nazi ambassador to Morocco. To accomplish this audacious goal he has to meet up with his “wife” and cover Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), who has spent the last few months ingratiating herself with the German occupation government and wrangling an invitation to the grand…Read More
Review: Fury
War is inherently cinematic. The stark comparison between good and bad, the grey areas of moral or amoral behavior, the stripping away of the thin veneer of civilization and civilized behavior, and the historical replay — or reinvention — of heinous situations. It’s no wonder that for any given war there are dozens if not hundreds of films. No war has been covered more thoroughly than World War II, however, with its deep and profound…Read More
Review: 12 Years a Slave
It’s difficult to imagine a more troubled historical era in American history than the mid 1800s when the Northern states had emancipated former black slaves as free citizens, while Southern states continued the heinous practice of slavery, albeit with the promise of “papers” granting freedom after a certain period of indentured servitude. Lesser known were the bands of slavers who would kidnap free blacks in the Northern states and ship them South, sold into slavery…Read More
The Best Films of 2009
I’ve spent the time to rant about the films I saw last year that I thought were the worst of the bunch, not just middling experiences, but genuinely “how on Earth did they ever raise the money to make this abomination?” movies where they either started out okay and slowly collapsed on their own weight (like Knowing) or were daft from the get-go (like Transformers 2). The worst of the bunch, though, must have been…Read More
Review: Inglourious Basterds
It’s wonderful to watch a talented professional mature in their skills and with the release of Inglourious Basterds that’s what’s clearly happened with wunderkind director and film biz bad boy Quentin Tarantino. His earlier works are best typified by Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, interesting stories that are so extraordinarily violent that the graphic violence appears in lieu of story or character development. Let me put this another way: Inglorious Basterds is the first Tarantino…Read More