Author Archive
Film Review – Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
Kidnapping Mr. Heineken puts us into the paranoid mind set of the kidnappers in this tense true crime drama. Knowing nothing about the case of the beer moguls abduction before seeing the film I did have a lot of assumptions about what would happen that did…
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2015 Oscar Predictions – Ben’s Picks
The Academy Awards are here again and unlike most years I am actually ready to move on to the next year. Don’t get me wrong, I will watch and get excited and angry depending on the results but most awards are pretty wrapped up except,…
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Film Review – Still Alice
Alzheimer’s movies have become Oscar bait and for the worst possible reasons. This is a disease that is one of the most easy emotional pulls for people, not just that so many of us have known someone with this disease but it also brings out…
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Film Review – Wild
Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) is preparing to go on a 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild. We are not told why, but sense that this is something she thinks she needs to do even though she cannot say why. As she starts out, she…
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Film Review – Force Majeure
People’s values and instincts are often at odds with themselves; we believe that in a dangerous situation we would do the right thing and yet we can never know until the situation presents itself. Director Ruben Östlund does something interesting in that he creates the…
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Film Review – Inside the Mind of Leonardo
Da Vinci has been a subject that has been dealt with several times in film, television, books, you name it, so Inside the Mind of Leonardo‘s idea of taking Da Vinci’s own words (spoken beautifully by Peter Capaldi) and drawings to get across more about…
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Film Review – The Lookalike
The Lookalike has the ambition to be an intense, multiple-character epic about revenge and the drug trade, but it is weighed down in overblown dialogue, underdeveloped characters, and a story that is too involved in itself for its own good. This is one of the most…
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Film Review – Citizenfour
Citizenfour‘s examination of Edward Snowden and the issue of government surveillance, while clearly on the side of more transparency from the government, allows that viewpoint to come across through a natural progression of seeing Snowden and the journalists who broke the story deal with the…
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