The Descendants – 2011

In my ongoing love affair with Alexander Payne, I have just watched The Descendants. George Clooney gives one of his finest performances as Matt King, a husband and father whose wife is dying. He lends humor to a role that shouldn’t be funny and makes sympathy into something that seems hard to come by. The […]

Jour de Fête – 1949

Jacques Tati was a comedic master. His films exploited the simplicity of life and the conflict that occurred as new technological innovations came into play. Jour de Fête is no exception and it isn’t here that he got a taste for the slapstick comedy that defined his career. Here he is Francois the mailman, who […]

99 Homes – 2014

America is a place where people believe that they can accomplish anything, where they can have anything, where they can do anything. 99 Homes is the cold hard reality of the American dream. The film follows a single father named Nash who loses his family home during the housing collapse. He then finds himself working […]

Sideways – 2004

Paul Giamatti is a sad sack. Maybe not in real life, but he plays one extremely well, Sideways is no exception. Directed by, the always masterful, Alexander Payne, Sideways is the story of two men on a week-long wine tasting in California before one’s upcoming nuptials. Obviously, there are tons of things that happen between […]

Watership Down – 1978

Bunnies. Bunnies trying to kill each other. Watership Down is a great book and the movie version lives up to the same hype as the book. There are, of course, small deviations and slight condensations, but overall it is the same. The film version is animated, which was pretty much the only way to do […]

Mustang – 2015

Sometimes you can feel that something is going to go wrong in a movie. Mustang is the story of five teenage (mostly) girls who are trapped in their house after their oppressive grandmother and uncle decide they have disgraced the family. Eventually the girls are set up in arranged marriages since wives is the only […]