Steve Jobs Review
RATING: (3 STARS) End-to-end control. It’s a personal computing philosophy that drove Steve Jobs and comes up regularly as a point of confrontation in the movie Steve Jobs. Many of his contemporaries and colleagues felt end-to-end control, which restricts a device’s compatibility with other devices, would significantly narrow a user’s possibilities. And that’s exactly what […]
Predicting the 2014 Golden Globes Winners
This Sunday, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will carve for itself a unique place in the 2013/2014 awards season. How do I know? Because it must. There still isn’t much consensus among this year’s major categories. The critics groups like 12 Years a Slave and Her. American Hustle and Gravity have loads of support—some from […]
Venice and Telluride: What We’ve Learned So Far
Click on over to my 2014 Oscar Predictions page to see everything I’m forecasting in the major categories. We’re mere days into the fall movie season, and already the Oscar landscape has changed significantly. I’ve updated my Oscar predictions today, and I will continue to on a weekly basis—every Wednesday—until the season ends. I will […]
2013 TIFF Movies to Watch: #10-#1
My TIFF preview concludes today with some of festival’s heaviest hitters. I hope you enjoyed this series. I’ll be covering the fall fests extensively, so stay tuned! More TIFF Movies to Watch: 2013 TIFF Preview: Part 1 2013 TIFF Preview: Part 2 2013 TIFF Preview: Part 3 2013 TIFF Preview: Part 4 10.) The Past […]
Carnage Review
RATING: (2 STARS) With names like Roman Polanski, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz, and Kate Winslet front and center, Carnage has no right being such a wet blanket of a movie. Its premise is golden—two sets of parents meet to discuss a physical altercation between their children. Chaos, of course, ensues, but it’s […]
Revolutionary Road Review
RATING: (3.5 STARS) Revolutionary Road is one of the most literary adaptations I’ve seen in some time. By that, I mean the film looks, sounds, and is structured as if it was directed by the source’s author Richard Yates, rather than Sam Mendes. That’s not a bad thing, per se. In fact, I think it […]
Contagion Review
RATING: (4 STARS) By staying away from the familiar conventions of most thrillers, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion manages to reach a level of believability and natural tension that I thought impossible out of a film like this. There are no chases, nor are there any heroes and villains. In fact, the characters in Contagion take a […]
Sense and Sensibility Review
RATING: (4 STARS) In high school English class, I was the kid who usually didn’t bother reading the assigned novels. Victorian-style lit wasn’t really my thing. Unfortunately for me, filmmakers seem to love these types of stories. We’ve got plenty screen interpretations of Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, and Jane Eyre (with […]
