— by BEV QUESTAD — An African-American author and professor with a PhD, a genius with excellent writing ability, crafts an acclaimed novel. Another author, feigning he is a fugitive from the FBI, misspells words and uses a vernacular dialect. He writes about a rough, poverty-ridden Black[...]
Archive for December, 2023
Review: The Boys in the Boat
— by BEV QUESTAD — It’s 1936 and Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) lives in a Seattle Depression-era Hooverville. He stands with men in a soup line for one ladle of thin gruel. He mother died when he was fourand his father left the family when he was 14. He’s a quiet, muscular guy used to [&[...]
Review: The Teachers’ Lounge
— by BEV QUESTAD — Maybe it’s difficult being a movie star who is badgered by press, a police person who is wearing a body camera or a university president defining the First Amendment before Congress, but just try being a schoolteacher dealing with misbehavior correctly in the classro[...]
Review: The Inventor
— by BEV QUESTAD — The Pope asks the inventor, “Why can’t you be satisfied with just painting pretty things for God?” But Leonardo hardly has time to answer. He is driven to investigate the cosmos. He wants the answers to life’s deepest questions. He is warned, “Don’t you wor[...]
Review: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
— by BEV QUESTAD — Like most Tom Cruise thrillers, “Dead Reckoning” is full of death-defying, hair-rising and honestly, pretty comical moments for the hero. Beginning with an explanation of “the most fearsome killing machine in the world ever devised by man and impossible to find,[...]
Review: The Taste of Things
— by BEV QUESTAD — Eugenie (marvelously played by Juliette Binoche) is picking vegetables from her cook’s garden in the verdant Loire Region of France. It is 1889 and she is an extraordinary cook for a famous chef, Dodin Bouffant (the superb Benoît Magimel), who owns a modest chateau [...]
Review: To Kill a Tiger
— by BEV QUESTAD — This is a violent story filmed within a gentle, moving, inspiring, gorgeous ambiance with lilting sitar, tabla and flute music whispering throughout as if this was a love story. And indeed it is. It shows the stand-out courage, commitment and love of a father who suppo[...]
Review: Never Too Late for Love
— by BEV QUESTAD — Man vs. The Establishment. Retired Professor Astolfo has been evicted from his apartment of twenty years in Rome so that the owner can give it to her daughter and new husband. What now? Why not move into that section of the run-down palace willed to him many years ago?[...]
Review: Radical
— by BEV QUESTAD — Matamoros, on the Rio Grande border across from Texas, is known for its year-round subtropical climate, deep-water seaport, Hispanic culture and crossing point for cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine, weapons and human trafficking. The entire town is at-risk and sixth g[...]
Review: Blueback
— by BEV QUESTAD — It is Abby’s 8th birthday. Her mother exclaims, “You know what that means!” They go out into the bay in their speedboat and Mom tosses a special ring overboard. Abby seems hesitant and scared. With just a snorkel, her mother expects her to follow the anchor chain[...]
Review: Jacob the Baker
— by BEV QUESTAD — A news reporter is assigned to interview Noah, the writer of the Jacob the Baker series, which has been translated into 18 languages. She resents the assignment, wanting to cover more important new stories, but she complies. She asks all the good questions and with eve[...]
Review: Total Trust
— by BEV QUESTAD — In the US, freedom includes easily obtaining guns and having demonstrations with incendiary rhetoric. It is also a place where there are mass shootings, school shootings, random shootings and college presidents who ignore students calling for the genocide of another gr[...]
Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
— by BEV QUESTAD — What could be more fun for a movie than a mix of humans, aliens and furry anthropomorphic animals dressed up like humans? Especially adorable is Rocket, a furry racoon-like little guy voiced by Bradley Cooper. The premise in the the third of this three-part film series[...]
Review: Fast Charlie
— by BEV QUESTAD — “Fast Charlie” is a fun “Dirty Harry” meets “James Bond” kind of film. It is implausibility incarnate doused with a little wry humor and a quick-thinking, gun-slinging suave, nicely dressed, handsome guy. It all matches up except that Charlie Swift (Pierce [...]