La La Land (2016)
[This is a review from the 2016 Chicago International Film Festival. La La Land opens nationwide December 16th.] “I’m a phoenix rising from the ashes.” Perhaps the best way to describe the […]
Category Archives: Drama
Queen of Katwe (2016)
“In chess, the small one can become the big one.” The more I read about world affairs and watch the news and study foreign cinema, the more I discount […]
The Birth of a Nation (2016)
“You listen to him and you might just make it into heaven.” Courage. Wisdom. Vision. These are the traits a young Nat Turner is told he possesses long before serving […]
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)
“This isn’t even the fun part.” Like so many YA fantasies being brought to the screen of late, Miss Peregrines’s Home for Peculiar Children has too much scope to be understood in […]
The Hollars (2016)
“Can we cut the s*** here, for a second?” People do not experience emotions the way they are portrayed and supposedly felt in The Hollars, one of the year’s biggest disappointments and […]
Deepwater Horizon (2016)
“Never hurts to run a test.” Deepwater Horizon starts with a bang. Not literally – plenty of those are saved for later. The screen is black as we listen to real […]
Sing Street (2016)
“You can never do anything by half.” Sing Street is a movie for music fans, for lovers of defiant romance, and for the displaced teens lining the walls of middle schools the […]
Hell or High Water (2016)
“You got some spunk left in you.” The term dime novel is often used in a negative context to describe indulgent, hurried material. Hell or High Water looks that way on the […]
Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016)
“How in the hell did I end up here again?” Once you look past the egregious typo in the title and the intermittent phoniness of Bridget Jones’s Diary (it literally pains […]
Morris from America (2016)
“I just don’t have anything to prove to these people.” The biggest issue with the “fish out of water” framing device is that the stories generally feel off and combative, focusing […]
Log's Line 