AN EX-HITMAN [Keanu Reeves] comes out of retirement to track down the gangsters that took everything from him. With New York City as its bullet-riddled playground, John Wick is a fresh and stylized take on the assassin genre. Here is… Read More ›
Film
Life Itself, a review
I WAS NOT A devotee of Roger Ebert, but Life Itself makes me wish I’d paid more attention to a career that transversed more than five decades.
Locke: a life deconstructed
IN HIS LATEST FILM, “Locke,” British actor Tom Hardy plays the role of a construction manager. From this one may deduce not only a job description but an identity. Ivan Locke is a man who constructs, and Steven Knight’s screenplay… Read More ›
If You Think Aronofsky’s Noah is Wacky, Try Reading the Original
ENTIRE NATIONS have now banned the film Noah. In the United States, Christians are unhappy with a Hollywood movie that substitutes, for the all-knowing and all-mighty LORD God Almighty, a distant, Pagan deity known vaguely as “the Creator.” Aronofsky’s Noah,… Read More ›
Who Exactly is Joining the Dallas Buyers Club?
MONTREAL DIRECTOR Jean-Marc Vallée first got my attention with the excellent French-language film C.R.A.Z.Y.. Now he’s taken his notoriety to a new level, with Dallas Buyers Club, written by Craig Borten and starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and Jared Leto.
Is Llewyn Davis a Loser?: The Coen Brothers’ Comedy of Error
THERE’S A STORY about Mike Dubue of the Hilotrons that goes something like the following: Mike plays a gig in Ottawa. An ex-girlfriend is in the audience, and she loves the show. So she takes out a scrap of paper… Read More ›
Mel Gibson and the Holy War Against Secular Modernity
THIS PAST week news arrived of a forthcoming Mel Gibson project, a Warner Brothers “biopic” concerning the life of Judah Maccabee. The announcement provoked the inevitable outrage, an example of which is Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,… Read More ›
Crazy, Stupid, Love and the Comedy of Middle Aged Failure
LET US BEGIN by acknowledging the obvious, that the 2011 movie Crazy, Stupid, Love is light and pleasant, adult fare but hardly a work of depth or of high seriousness. Its architecture is thoroughly of a Shakespearean cast, in which… Read More ›
