Despite the change in directors, Hunger Games: Catching Fire maintains a similar coolness and eeriness imparted by the first. While the first installment created a Nazi-driven subtext, the second emphasizes President Snow’s (Donald Sutherland) and Plutarch Heavensby’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) darkness. The suffocating imageries of both jungle and ocean add to the feelings of isolation and apprehension […]

 

 

Simultaneously melancholic and beautiful, Nebraska explores the dangers of trust.

 

 

The first five minutes of Lone Survivor feels like an advertisement for the Navy. The film opens with the training of Navy SEALS. With each one that rings the bell three times and quits, another perseveres and harnesses their freezing, shaking, breaking down bodies into an unconscious aggression. Peter Berg brings his familiar Friday Night Lights style […]

 

 

Desolation of Smaug will become the most memorable chapter, but this doesn’t make it any more substantial than the first.

 

 

“It’s new and it never gets old,” Llewyn Davis tells the audience twice in the Coen brothers’ emotionaly powerful new film, Inside Llewyn Davis. Set in 1961 Greenwhich Village, the film follows one week in the life of Llewyn Davis, a nomadic folk singer who must routinely way his need for money against his refusal to abandon […]

 

 

Enough Said honestly depicts the evolution of marriage, divorce, and the aftermath.

 

 

Paul Walker’s role in Hours is a departure from the most familiar Brian O’Conner that occupies the various Fast-speckled franchise. As Nolan Hayes, he is asked to find a deeper emotional peril as a husband who has recently lost his wife and a father who is on the verge of losing his prematurely-born daughter in the wake […]

 

 

First and foremost, Blackfish, the 2013 documentary from  Gabriela Cowperthwaite, makes me regret visiting Sea World when I was nine years old. More importantly as a documentary, Blackfish exposes a large tourist attraction as little more than a shady zoo for aquatic life and humans alike. Orca whales are the main attraction in both the documentary Sea World. In particular, […]

 

 

Beautiful and sensual, Blue is the Warmest Color explores the various complexities of contemporary relationships.

 

 

If Blue Valentine and Antichrist had a child, The Broken Circle Breakdown would be it – without the clitorectomy and preternatural, talking fox of course. Regardless, this Belgian progeny investigates the various impacts parents experience after losing a child. Early on, we meet the adorable Maybelle and her parents, Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh).  Diagnosed […]