Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart are giants in the entertainment industry. Both performers have an immeasurable fan base and in their careers have delivered much laughter and happiness. It’s an odd choice that they agreed to work on a project that involves the lowest, most primitive forms of comedy: homophobic jokes and racism. Get Hard is a mixed bag because it does contain sporadic moments of …
Wolfgang Beltracchi lived a life of lavish parties and exquisite art, gorgeous villas and expensive vacations, and it was all paid for with forgeries. For decades, Beltracchi had been scamming the art world out of millions of dollars by faking the works of masters of early 20th century art. This highly profitable scam came to an end in 2010 when Beltracchi, his wife and two associates were arrested for fraud, and …
Hard To Be A God doesn’t really care about the traditional audience. It is a hard film. To the viewer with normal patience, it does not contain a cogent plot or coherent dialogue, it is frequently distressing, and almost always disgusting to look at. However, to ignore it, would be to miss out on one of the most unique films ever made.
In film noir, nothing good comes out of the past, but the present ain’t so hot, either, and anyone with an ounce of self preservation knows that someone who speaks of a bright future ahead is offering up a hot, steaming plate of false promises. Though it rejects the past as well as any other film noir of the period, Louise Milestone’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) also stated that the only way to survive was …
We as a society have a real problem dealing with ourselves. Especially when it comes to women. Despite making up over half of our population, years of minimization and the bolstering of a patriarchal model have, with no true reasoning, positioned women as lesser. In the very way women are…
For years I have been struggling to understand this grindhouse resurgence. The generation of dirty theaters with even dirtier movies was before mine, so I don’t share this reverence for the absurd. Scratched up prints, missing reels, laughably awful acting, and buckets of fake blood seemed like a gimmick, an…
Charming, engaging and humane, Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987) was the first film by the Iranian director to gain significant attention outside of his home country. In this simple tale, young Mohamed Reda Nematzadeh (Ahmed Ahmed Poor) is scolded by his teacher (Kheda Barech Defai), not for failing to do his homework, but for failing to write it all down in his notebook.
It was W.C. Fields that famously said, “never work with animals or children.” I get it, both kids and animals are largely uncontrollable, erratic, and somehow always hungry. They can be a distraction and often end up being one of the most talked about elements of a film. Jean Dujardin may have won the Oscar for The Artist, but I’m pretty sure more people were talking about Uggie the…
Barbara Stanwyck was already a star when she began work on Baby Face (1933), one of the most scandalous films of Hollywood’s pre-Code era. Known for her films made with Frank Capra as well as a series of typical pre-Code roles — nurse, struggling housewife, fallen woman with a heart of gold — Stanwyck in 1933 was one of Warner Bros. Studios’ newest, freshest stars. The studio’s reputation for ….
Once upon a time, there was a young girl who believed in the power of kindness, fell in love and married her Prince Charming and lived happily ever after. Based on Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de verre, the timeless and much-loved story of Cinderella finds its way…