Saturday, April 16, 2016

99 Homes: Movie Review


   


Making deals with the devil – thrilling, intense, fascinating.
99 Homes is the best film ever made about the housing crisis. It combines the reality (banks foreclosing on homes) with real emotion (option-less people both heartbreakingly giving up and being pushed to their violent limits) surrounding a story about a ruthless villain turning a down-on-his-luck victim into a rising star using the basic film formula of descent-into-madness. It is both a taut, entertaining, comedic thriller and emotional family drama. Or arguably, a Greek tragedy. 2014

Directed by: Ramin Bahrani

Screenplay by: Ramin Bahrani, Amir Naderi

Starring: Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Everybody Wants Some!!: Movie Review


   


Finds a few golden nuggets in the entertaining realism.
In just the last two years, filmmaker Richard Linklater has looked at a boy’s formative years, the marriage of two middle-aged characters, and now he’s going back to college. He has called Everybody Wants Some!! a spiritual sequel to the 1970s high school stoner comedy Dazed and Confused. A highly regarded early film for him, but one that I could just never get into. Instead of the last day of high school, it’s now the first weekend of college in the 1980s for a new set of characters. 2016

Directed by: Richard Linklater

Screenplay by: Richard Linklater

Starring: Blake Jenner, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Glen Powell

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Eye in the Sky: Movie Review


   


Smart, thought-provoking thriller.
CD, collateral damage, is the one term used to describe a little girl selling bread in Nairobi. Eye in the Sky is a tough watch, but it so expertly weaves in between the characters on different continents that all have a stake in this deadly (no matter how you look at it) attack. Military personnel have zeroed in on a person of interest, a radicalized terrorist who is literally plotting the destruction of countless of lives. 2015

Directed by: Gavin Hood

Screenplay by: Guy Hibbert

Starring: Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman and Barkhad Abdi