— by RON WILKINSON — Nine-year-old Junior is on the war path with his mother. What else is new? The ageless story of kid versus parent is told again, this time in the tough streets of the projects in Caracas, Venezuela. His mother, Marta, has lost her job and is in the process of giving [...]
Archive for November, 2014
Eddie Redmayne receives The Maserati Award
Last night, at the 32nd Turin Film Festival, British actor Eddie Redmayne was awarded the exclusive Maserati Award. The House of the Trident chose to award a young talent with the commemorative statue of the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna, the precious monument that inspired Mario Maserati to create[...]
Review: Camp X-Ray
— by RON WILKINSON — Peter Sattler’s directorial debut is as bare and exposed as a prisoner in a cell. A stripped down film about warehousing human beings and waiting for the next step. The next step for the inmate is release, and it may come sooner than the next step for the jaile[...]
Review: Mending the Line
— by BEV QUESTAD — This is the perfect Veteran Day’s film. It is the story of a WWII vet named Frank Moore and his reconciliation with the unspeakable inhumanity he suffered in war interwoven with his passion for a fishing rod, nature and a beautiful wife. Miraculously, there is a save[...]
Review: Diplomacy
— by RON WILKINSON — After watching Volker Schlöndorff’s (Oscar-winning German director of “The Tin Drum”) touching, scary and occasionally funny rendition of an imaginary meeting that decided the fate of Paris, you may never watch “My Dinner With Andre” in the same way again.[...]
Review: Before I Go To Sleep
— by RON WILKINSON — Nicole Kidman gives it her best shot but there is simply not enough going on in Rowan Joffe’s psychological drama to make it work. The lack of plot is aggravated by the bizarre use of jarring loud noises and the guessing games the audience goes through trying to un[...]
Review: Interstellar
— by RON WILKINSON — Christopher Nolan’s $165 million IMAX space lollapalooza is all the better for starting in the most modest of environments. It is some time in the future, some place in the American Midwest. Things are not going well, according to the elderly respondents. Blights a[...]
Review: The Heart Machine
— by RON WILKINSON — Writer/director Zachary Wigon’s essay on the vicissitudes of internet love starts innocently enough. A quiet, intimate conversation in the privacy of Cody’s (John Gallagher Jr. of “The Newsroom” and “Short Term 12”) East Village apartment with a possible [...]
Review: Seeds of Hope
— by BEV QUESTAD — This is the story of Masika Katsuva, a Congolese woman of extraordinary resolve and resiliency. Though she has wanted to kill herself many times, and though she sometimes prays to God to take her life just so she can get some rest, Masika is a transformer of spirits an[...]
Review: Return to Homs
— by BEV QUESTAD — The new Homs sidewalk is a passage through the crashed out walls of uninhabited apartments inside bombed-out buildings. If you want to get somewhere, just take a mallet and make holes in a series of walls. Eventually you will make it to the end of the block where you c[...]
Review: Reaching for the Stars (aka Sepidah)
— by BEV QUESTAD — So we finally have it in an innocent documentary about a young girl interested in astronomy. “If you do something wrong I’ll kill you. I swear to God. Whether it’s my own daughter or my sister’s. I mean it.” Dialogues like this are just one reason for the imp[...]