Sorted by date Results 1 - 4 of 4
Sweet Country is a ponderous, brutal, and powerful movie about life in the Australian Outback in the 1920s. It is a very fine piece of filmmaking that I recommend with caution: those who have experienced trauma will find plenty of triggers here. This is a tragedy. From the very beginning, there's a sense of dread hanging over every scene, a feeling that something bad will happen-it's inevitable, and no one can do anything about it. You almost don't want anything good to...
First Reformed is a puzzling, provocative, powerful movie. Ethan Hawke stars as Ernst Toller, the rector of a very small, very old Dutch Reformed church somewhere in upstate New York. About ten people attend his Sunday services, and Hawke's time is mostly occupied with giving tours of the historical church grounds-including its expansive graveyard and secret compartment where escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad sought refuge-and selling souvenirs (the pastor across...
Te Ata feels like a Hallmark production, if Hallmark were ever even slightly willing to be critical of the United States government and its Indian policies. It is a well-meaning tribute to Chickasaw storyteller Mary Francis Thompson, whose stage name was Te Ata. According to the film, that name means "Bearer of the Morning," and her grandmother gave it to her when she was a baby because she wailed so loudly at dawn. Thompson (Q'orianka Kilcher) grew up in Oklahoma in the early...
While Fences was released on Christmas Day in 2016, our reviewer, Will Krischke, feels if you haven't seen it yet-or even if you have-it's a perfect movie to pop into your DVD player or stream at any time. As it opens, Fences feels like it's going to be a film about overt systemic racism in the '50s. Troy (Denzel Washington) plays a garbage man who has complained, perhaps a little too loudly, about how black folks are always on the back of the truck while white folks are...
