Movies Archive
Leviathan
Just to see how much alcohol the characters in the film consume is enough to make you cry, and that is only one of many sad things about life in modern Russia.
Still Alice
Watching Moore forget a dinner date in her early stages, making a video for her future self to find one day, or struggling to locate the bathroom in her vacation home, we see how the disease plays out.
Kingsman: The Secret Service
No matter how crisp the writing or engaging the characters, the nauseating array of severed limbs and broken necks drain the movie of all the joy it works so hard to supply.
A Most Violent Year
Instead of films that provide character studies of snipers who lose their humanity but are depicted as heroes, let’s watch character studies that make us think deeply about what it means to be an honorable person.
Not based on a true story
You just can’t include everything and every nuance. And directors of dramatic films are interested in a dramatic story that fits their larger vision.
Selma
Selma brings the stakes of being black in the American South to life with horrific clarity.
Best Films of 2014
Three of our Media Matters reviewers offer their “Top Ten” lists for 2014, each in their own format.
Big Eyes
In an attempt to sell their paintings, Walter takes credit for Margaret’s work, which becomes phenomenally successful, to the chagrin of art critics who consider the paintings nothing but kitsch.
Two Intelligent Men
Two recent releases, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, offer glimpses into the lives of two British geniuses, Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking. With the exposure of Turing’s homosexuality, I expected that narrative to have more emotional intensity and a more clearly articulated point of view. I was wrong. As Hawking says in one of the final scenes of the film when asked if he believes in God, which most of his research has seemed to open the possibility of, “To live is to have hope.” The Imitation Game, based on the story of Alan Turing, exposes the […]
Antarctica: A Year on Ice
These are the people who choose alternative paths—people whose cold-nipped faces blaze with life and a self-deprecating sense of humor over their love affair with a place that, in winter time, brews the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane every week.
