Sherlock Holmes is a character so ingrained in our cultural imagination that it’s hard to think up any new spin on him. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented a character who became an archetype, even for procedural television, as the airwaves are still littered with brilliant assholes who owe their very existence to the original detective of 221B Baker Street.
Love & Mercy Written by Oren Moverman & Michael A. Lerner Directed by Bill Pohlad USA, 2015 Based on the life of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, Love & Mercy depicts the singer’s descent into mental illness at the peak of the band’s popularity in the 1960s, while in the 1980s a chance meeting with …
The 1990’s introduced the world to Quentin Tarantino, saw the creation of the NC-17 rating, and began the slow call toward fully computer animated films. It began the slow (still slow) movement toward a more diverse industry, with the first African-American director earning an Oscar nomination (John Singleton for “Boyz in the Hood”). And the …
“Most good stories start at the beginning,” intones a journalist during The Fifth Estate, a bold statement to make in a film that starts very near the end. The story of how WikiLeaks, and its enigmatic Australian founder Julian Assange, rose to worldwide prominence and notoriety over the last 5 years, is not without merit, but this adaptation fails to reach the same height of earned importance.
High concept is always a tricky beast. By its very nature, it always threatens to completely overshadow its own efforts and render the effort to capture the wonder of an emphatic hypothetical question rather academic. The query pondered by Peter Weir’s 1998 satire The Truman Show was one that any viewer can appreciate; ‘What if every moment of your life was being televised for the entertainment of the masses?’
While I’ve never had trouble identifying with the bulk of male roles across film and television, I cannot deny that I do delight in finding gems wherein the women get lines, and maybe even their own narrative. It’s no secret that women are grossly underrepresented in films and television, both onscreen and behind the scenes. …
Hyde Park on Hudson Directed by Roger Michell Written by Richard Nelson United Kingdom, 2012 There’s been a debate brewing online lately over whether or not movies should stray beyond being roughly two hours. Those in favor of shorter films argue that there’s no discernible advantage in making movies so lengthy aside from filmmakers being …
The Details Directed by Jacob Aaron Estes Written by Jacob Aaron Estes USA, 2011 Tobey Maguire exists in a kind of netherworld as a performer. When he played Peter Parker in the original Spider-Man trilogy, he was often criticized for looking too old to play a high school senior or, later, a college freshman. (This, …