First of all, if you come from a military family, try to pay attention to the movie and avoid drawing any random parallels to your own life and experiences. I did this the whole way through the movie, which is ultimately what the filmmakers want. I’m not saying that I melted into a puddle of …
I visited Cambodia a few years ago—it’s a beautiful country with lovely land and a youthful population (which betrays the millions killed during the Khmer Rouge’s reign in the 1970s and 80s). I experienced the horror of walking through one of the infamous killing fields, where bone fragments and scraps of decayed clothes still surface …
Director Kathryn Bigelow’s tale of an Iraq war bomb squad is a lesson in film editing for maximum impact. The Hurt Locker has the urgency of news footage (which isn’t surprisingly as the screenplay was written by journalist Mark Boal who was embedded with a special bomb unit in Iraq), and has the shaky intense …
A refreshingly sweet yet no-nonsense love story, the Israeli gay-soldier romance Yossi & Jagger manages to do in a brisk 65 minutes what so many American films of the same genre fail so miserably at: introduce us to well-developed characters that we care about, without resorting to eyeball-rolling stereotypes. Almost all the action of the …
If it weren’t for the fact that The Big Parade came out in 1925, four years before the first Oscar was awarded, it would probably now be included as part of that shortlist of films that have won piles of awards. Instead, I had never heard of this film before cozying up on my couch …
The story follows a group of young Germans who, swept up in a tide of patriotism, join the military to fight for the fatherland in World War I. It is first unclear whom the story is going to follow, but a good ways into the film we start to pick out Paul, a young man …
There are many Best Picture winners, true classics from Golden Age of Hollywood, that stand the test of time, like Gone With the Wind, It Happened One Night, or Rebecca. Then you have movies like Cavalcade, that have the credentials, but, well, no one really talks about them anymore. I think in the back of …
Kaja (hottie Edgar Martinez-look-alike Nebojsa Glogovac) is a burned-out basketball star. He no longer plays, his wife is estranged, and their 5-year-old kid has stopped talking as a result of the fright of the bombings. Kaja hangs out with his buddies, a bunch of guys out of work, who bitch and moan and fear getting …