“Changeling” reminds me a lot of 1997 thriller “L.A Confidential” in that it deals with police corruption and P.Ds’ frightening level of power. The problem with that is “Changeling” takes place about 25 years earlier — same police department, same problems, different era. It’s unfortunate how incompetent our criminal justice system was and in many [...]

There aren’t many overcoming-the-odds stories quite like that of Christy Brown. Born with cerebral palsy in 1930s Dublin, his parents thought his handicap was mental as well as physical. Though eventually properly diagnosed, Brown, in a lower working-class family with nearly 20 children, had to push himself just to be appreciated by his family. Through [...]

Sometimes a good story is all a film needs to be successful. Khaled Hosseini’s novel is one of those stories and with a more-than-competent director in charge, “The Kite Runner” was set to fly as a film. Maybe not as high as one might expect, but there’s nothing but quality storytelling being done here. “The [...]

I think there’s actually a proverb somewhere that says “On one of three things a film contends for Oscars: Clint Eastwood directing, Morgan Freeman acting and a compelling historical figure as the lead role.” The person who first uttered this saying would take one look at “Invictus” and say: “well that’s not fair.” But despite [...]

A great piece of music — and this is especially true of works for piano — conveys a mood or sometimes many moods; it is incredibly affective. While listening you might feel comfortable and at ease at one point and then suddenly chaotic and unsettled at another. This is certainly true of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. [...]

The challenges awaiting Joe Penhall and John Hillcoat in adapting and directing (respectively) Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” had to be numerous. This post-apocalyptic father-and-son story about whether struggling to survive as long as possible is worth the pain is a bleak tale and one that grinds along much of the time. It doesn’t have more [...]

Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s book “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a classic and the film version gets by on this fact alone. The rather faithful adaptation is enough to satisfy fans of the novel, but not even the great George Roy Hill can manage to turn Stephen Geller’s uninspired script into a more meaningful movie experience.

Martin Scorsese’s second collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio is “The Aviator,” a nearly three-hour biopic examining about a thirty-year window in the life of airline and movie mogul Howard Hughes, whose successes in aviation and Hollywood romances made him shine in the public eye despite the bankrupting methods and slowly growing obsessive compulsions that tore at [...]

Forty years later, it’s much harder to call John Schlesinger’s film “Midnight Cowboy” avant- garde, but the greatest X-rated film of all time is as much a reflection of the ’60s as it is a study of unusual and pitiable characters. Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is a cowboy by attitude, hustler by trade who travels [...]

“Dead Poets Society” is a maturing into adulthood drama whose story and messages are as instructional as they are inspiring. The film is like an inspirational teacher, the one in high school that changed the way you thought about life and knowledge. It reflects this in Mr. Keating, the teacher who touched the lives of [...]

“Looks are deceiving” would be an adequate way to describe the “The Elephant Man” as a film from the outside, but it would be a horribly amateur way to describe its message. David Lynch’s film soars beyond mere pity for those with life-altering physical abnormalities and serves as more than just a slap on the [...]

“Gran Torino” has to be the only good politically incorrect film to ever be made. Clint Eastwood’s character Walt Kowalski is a crotchety and ignorant old Korean War vet whose vocabulary is a thesaurus of racial slurs. He’s basically a racist Dirty Harry in his 70s-80s and the script hits us over the head with [...]

Dancing, passion and familial struggle are all tied together in the high-spirited “Billy Elliot,” the little independent film that could in 2000, when such films were drastically under- appreciated. “Billy Elliot” caught some attention however because it combines the dream-like fancy-free spirit of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films along with the social-historical context of [...]

“Rain Man” might be most remembered for Dustin Hoffman’s brave and remarkable performance as autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, but the film’s greatest strength lies elsewhere: its sense of humor. At first, you’re inclined not to laugh at Raymond’s oddities and especially not at the way his brother Charlie (Tom Cruise) treats him, but as the [...]

If you’re familiar with Charlie Kaufman’s work, then you understand that “Synecdoche, New York” is going to tell a story that’s abstract, that feels normal but is completely out of the ordinary, and rarely feels like it’s making sense. Now that he’s directing his own film this time, Kaufman, the brilliant but challenging writer behind [...]