Do you get claustrophobic? Do you have a fear of getting buried alive and/or drowning? Then Thirteen Lives may not be the most relaxing viewing for you. For the majority of this cave-rescue film, I ha…
While visiting friends in the rural area around Missoula, Montana, I heard about what the locals termed "mountain bachelors". These were guys who purposely had fallen off the grid, often due to trauma…
Kate Winslet plays Alex, a photo journalist whose investigative arsenal seems to consist of asking the question, "Are you married?" over and over. Idris Elba plays Ben, a serious, emotionally closed b…
In 2013, all but one of an elite crew of hotshot firefighters died in a horrific and cruel wildfire in Yarnell, Arizona, close to the team's home base of Granite Mountain near Prescott. I remember hea…
The Revenant (which I know from seeing the excellent, unrelated French series Les Revenants) means one who has returned from the dead. Though this is not really explained in this brutal film by Alejan…
I hate getting annoyed with movies that have such good intentions. It's not like there isn't a great story behind The Finest Hours, because indeed there is. In 1952, a wicked winter storm off Cape Cod…
In the Heart of the Sea is based on a book about a book, or, rather, the story behind the story that became Herman Melville's American classic Moby Dick. It was a tale so fantastical that it seemingly…
It's hard to comprehend the horror of being trapped in a mine for 69 days, but the film adaptation of the 2010 Chilean miner's ordeal does a surprisingly good job of recreating this nightmare for the …
Based on the true story of an ill-fated 1996 climbing expedition on the titular mountain – during which a violent storm blew in and took the lives of eight climbers – director Baltasar Kormákur’s visu…
Director Sean Penn delivers a thoughtful, somber, enlightening and occasionally exuberant drama with his big-screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name, which tells the true story of a …
There is something about man (and woman) against the elements that speaks to the adventurer in all of us, even if armchair adventure is all we can handle. I'm more than happy to leave such deadly hobb…
Peppered with flashbacks to highlight key moments from Zamperini’s formative years – including his introduction to long-distance running as a boy, and his headline-making appearance at the 1936 Berlin…
