With all the things concerning fictional narrative films out of the way for 2014, lets get to the non-fictional ones as there were several to take in, discover and enlighten. Not unlike the fictional narratives many of the best Documentaries focused on the Now, what are…

Thursday was the leading characters, today it’s the supporting players that amplify the onscreen story by giving the main characters something to play off of. Engaging the audience a few more layers by revealing more dimensions and shadings of the leading characters, and thusly the…

An outstanding year for film usually means an outstanding one for performances as well. First up are the lead roles that acted as our surrogates through many diverse and engaging narratives. From recovering depressives to battling mid-life crisis’s to tracking high-risk terror suspects to psychotics…

2014 has come and gone, another year in books, so as is movie reviewer tradition it is time to come up with a listing of the very best films that I saw in the past year. The end tally range from moody period-pieces to contemporary…

Now, here’s the way to make a truly resonating Bio-pic, the type of ‘Prestige Drama’ that gets it.  At the risk of going into spoiler territory I want to examine a scene late in Ava DuVernay’s topical and powerful Civil Rights Era Period Film Selma, which…

The very best movies of this recent past year concerned themselves with depicting life in the present; living in the here and now, whenever that “here and now” was. From the 60’s Poland to the 2000’s Austin, Texas. Enter auteur Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson who…

Making it in America: for the ‘if it bleeds; it leads’ crowd, AKA the current American media cycles. A satirical indictment of the media and its outlets has already had a go-around with Gone Girl earlier in the year, tackling the over-sensationalized aspects of nightly news, taking…

There are very few consecutive modern decades that share as little in common as the 50’s slowly transformed into the 60’s, going from the largely stoic and static 50’s to the kinetic and highly expressive 60’s. Indeed the paradigm shift between the two distinct eras…

Every writer from Shakespeare to Mamet will give you the same kind of gist: “Keep It Simple Stupid”. The Dardenne Brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, prove this time and again in their filmmaking and emphatically with their most recent project here. Marion Cotillard continues to yield…

A recent struggle to get some articles posted in the last month or so led me to a semi-existentialist question for myself. I get writer’s block for many reasons, going through long stretches of just not being able to properly translate my thoughts to a…