— by RON WILKINSON — There are love stories set in wartime, and there are war stories with love affairs. It is a rare film that succeeds in combining a nail-biting spy story with one of redemption through self-sacrifice. This movie does it by combining an ambivalent German SS captain wit[...]
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Review: The Reagan Show
— by RON WILKINSON — Fluffy and light hearted, as the final credits roll, political aficionados will wonder what it was they just saw. As it turns out, that is what this movie is all about. It is glossy, splashy and at times rib-ticklingly funny, but there is a lack of even the most basi[...]
Review: Baby Driver
— by RON WILKINSON — Ansel Elgort and writer/director Edgar Wright power through this mayhem fest with a quarter mile soundtrack and rocket launch car chases. Not chases, they are more like bike acrobatics with rocket assist engines instead of wheels. The story starts with near catatonic[...]
Review: Moka
— by RON WILKINSON — Frédéric Mermoud’s simmering revenge mystery is less thriller than self-study. Set on the shores of Lake Geneva, the misty miasma wafting across the cold fiord focuses the eye on the mysterious mountains along its shore. Diane (in a powerful performance by Emmanu[...]
Review: The Horse’s Mouth
— by BEV QUESTAD — The most important thing an artist must convey, to be truly worthy, is thought. “Straight from the horse’s mouth. You have to know when you succeed and when you fail and why. Know thyself in fact. In short, you have to think,” says Gulley Jimson. “The Horse’s[...]
Review: Sami Blood
— by RON WILKINSON — In a setting as forbidding as it is beautiful, 14-year-old Elle Marja ropes, tackles and then caresses a reindeer on the frozen ground. She is a young adult member of the Sami people and she is expected to pull her own weight. With the frozen arctic skies as her back[...]
Review: Lost in Lebanon
— by BEV QUESTAD — “Lost in Lebanon” is a film dear to my heart because when I went to school there, the same frustrating problem that was happening with the Palestinians in 1969 to 1970 is happening now with the Syrians. I returned to Beirut last year to honor my dearest professor, [...]
Review: Dawson City: Frozen in Time
— by RON WILKINSON — Imagine walking into a theater in 1910 and watching the newest silent melodrama in town. There are struggles for manly supremacy and vindication, hilarious slapstick, near and actual collisions between people, trains, horses, cars, buildings, dogs and trees and, of c[...]
Review: Black Code
— by BEV QUESTAD — “There is an obvious candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize and that’s Edward Snowden,” said Jon Karlung, CEO of Bahnhof, a Swedish Internet service provider in Stockholm that can monitor the monitors. Edward Snowden, a US citizen in exile in Russia, has alerted the[...]
Review: Berlin Syndrome
— by RON WILKINSON — Emerging director Cate Shortland’s kidnap thriller “Berlin Syndrome” is well done but adds little to the genre. Australian photojournalist Clare (Teresa Palmer) meets college writing professor Andi (Max Riemelt) and the two instantly fall in lust. T[...]
Review: The Good Postman
— by BEV QUESTAD — The genius of this documentary, set in a tiny town in Bulgaria, is that it is a microcosm of the world. While the citizens of Great Dervent, Bulgaria, fear change, strangers, unemployment and loneliness, their major contentious issue in a recent election is what to do [...]
Review: The Beguiled
— by RON WILKINSON — Filled with the simmering sensuality of Nicole Kidman’s “Dogville,” this movie starts out slow and builds to a delicious climax. Based on the 1966 novel by Thomas Cullinan, the story starts with a young girl from the nearby Farnsworth Seminary singing in the Vi[...]
Review: The Mummy
— by RON WILKINSON — Tom Cruise is back, heading a star-studded cast and crew in the kick-off flick of the summer B-movie season. He reprises his Maverick role as Nick, an uber-soldier who must do it his way. Along with nominal buddy Jake Johnson (TV’s “New Girl”) as Chris, Nick wa[...]