Before you ask, yes, you will cry at Coco. No matter how many Pixar movies you’ve seen, no matter how much tolerance you’ve built up to their brand of touching sincerity, and no matter how far into this particular outing you get without shedding a tear, you will have a small puddle at the bottom […]
Having written and co-directed films in the past, Greta Gerwig makes her debut as sole writer-director with Lady Bird, easily one of the year’s best films. Funny, insightful and deeply personal, yet wholly relatable for anyone who’s ever lived through the difficulty of attempting to define oneself early in life, Lady Bird is the first […]
While attempting a brief vacation from being the world’s greatest detective, Inspector Hercule Poirot has been reading the hell out of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. With every page, he cackles in delight, a reaction likely based as much on the opportunity to let someone else tell the stories as on the book […]
As events that transpired in Charlottesville inform the national conversation on the politics of race and resistance, the Virginia Film Festival has placed the subject at the center of this year’s programming. And the Race in America series features some of the best filmmaking on the subject. Attending this year’s festival will be veteran filmmaker […]
Smart and talented people who are aware of the fact that they are smart and talented sometimes have difficulty separating good ideas from the really, really bad ones. In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte, one of history’s greatest military minds, assembled the largest army to date to invade Russia, partially to ensure strategic dominance of Europe but […]
In 2013, one of the deadliest wildfires in recent history claimed 25 lives, 19 of whom were members of an elite squad of firefighters known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots. All but one lost their lives while struggling to contain the blaze, which appeared routine until wind and other factors allowed it to spread beyond […]
A civil rights superhero movie? Why not? For a country so enamored with our national mythology, we are remarkably inconsistent when it comes to cinematic depictions of our historical figures. After all, many of our founding fathers owned slaves, and many more recent icons emerged at a time when personal shortcomings could not be as easily […]
The story of Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim—“the Munshi”—is one worth telling. Karim, a humble clerk in Agra, was invited to participate in a ceremony for the queen, which resulted in the initiation of a peculiar friendship that defied convention and stirred controversy among the Royal Court. All of the ingredients are there: class antagonism, […]
Directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris continue their streak of slyly subversive, yet totally engaging, films with Battle of the Sexes, an insightful, exciting and unexpectedly hilarious recounting of the famous 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Like all Dayton-Faris outings, it breathes new life into familiar tropes while cleverly […]
It’s unfortunate that Stronger is being seen by some as “the other Boston Marathon bombing movie” after the release of Patriots Day earlier this year. The comparison shouldn’t even be made, but just in case there are people who might not see Stronger due to the association, let’s debunk and move on. The two could […]