In recent years, documented incidents from Irish history have inspired some powerful motion pictures, most notably Stephen Frears’s “Philomena,” which won considerable critical and commercial success in 2013. Revelations about the brutal treatment of children, including sexual abuse, by priests and the virtual imprisonment of unwed mothers in workhouses supervised by nuns, shocked Ireland, damaging […]
George Grella
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Film Review: “The Giver”
After a visit to the new Soviet Union in 1919, the great muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens famously remarked, “I have seen the future and it works.” In Hollywood, for many years they have seen the future and … it sucks. Dystopia now replaces any possibility of happiness in the brave new world that we’d like […]
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Film Review: “Magic in the Moonlight”
The experience of watching Woody Allen’s annual movie, “Magic in the Moonlight,” suggests that last year’s “Blue Jasmine” represents something of an anomaly in his long, prolific career. In that picture he abandoned a number of his perennial subjects — the upper West Side ambiance, the preoccupation with sexual inadequacy, the tendency to rely on […]
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Film Review: “I Origins”
Since the earliest years of cinema, science fiction has inspired filmmakers. Its major subjects — space travel, time travel, alien encounters, robots, the future — translate easily to film, the most magical of the arts, the most hospitable to the possibilities of fantasy. The form also responds to the dreams and fears of its time […]
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Film Review: “The Purge: Anarchy”
In a time when some politicians now kick off their campaigns in gun shops, armed yokels wave the Confederate flag outside the White House, a candidate in the South hosts target practice with President Obama’s face for a bull’s eye, a movie like “The Purge: Anarchy” must seem a gift from God to members of […]
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Film Review: “A Most Wanted Man”
When the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the specter of international communism ceased its decades of haunting the frightened souls of the West, many commentators wondered if the espionage novelist John le Carré would suddenly run out of subjects. But the author, one of the best contemporary English novelists, simply applied […]
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Film Review: “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”
The latest chapter in the long “Planet of the Apes” saga takes up the action just a few years into the future promised in the ending of the previous film, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” Some news reports bring the situation up to date, describing the rapid spread of the “simian virus,” actually […]
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Film Review: “Snowpiercer”
The concept of the apocalypse and especially its aftermath never ceases to fascinate science fiction writers and filmmakers. Whether it comes with a bang or a whimper, the end of the world makes for exciting cinema, but the day after doomsday provides the most promising subject for literature and film. Writers and directors employ a […]
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“Transformers: Age of Extinction”
If nothing else, the latest addition to one of the most successful contemporary franchises demonstrates once again that Hollywood can build a movie, whatever its quality, on the most unlikely foundation. Novels, short stories, plays, comic books, songs, even most recently a painting (“Belle”) provide the sources for hundreds of films, but the “Transformer” series […]
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“Jersey Boys”
Although he’s ridden the dusty trails of many Westerns and nailed scores of criminals in San Francisco and other cities, Clint Eastwood constantly expands his cinematic vision. He seems a most unlikely director for the adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, “Jersey Boys,” for example, but some of his films exhibit not only his versatility […]
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Film Review: “Citizen Koch”
Recalling the days of the Great Depression, when social and economic conditions inspired a number of gifted photographers and filmmakers to document the American experience, in our time the nonfiction film appears to be undergoing something of a renaissance. The contemporary documentary often confronts subjects ignored by the bland and timid mainstream media — revelations […]
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Film Review: “Ida”
Aside from special occasions organized by significant segments of the community like the local Polish film festival or the Jewish film festival, few motion pictures from Poland play in theaters in this country, which makes the release of the new movie “Ida” an unusual and welcome event. It also should make audiences grateful all over […]
