REVIEW: Chuck [2017]

“That guy could take a punch” Who is Chuck Wepner? It’s a legitimate question. I didn’t know—not that I’ve ever followed pugilism in my life. So when his story received the cinematic treatment from director Philippe Falardeau with the title The Bleeder, I honestly assumed fiction. Here comes another boxing movie about what’s assumedly a not-so-good fighter who bleeds like a sieve. Maybe it’ll be funny. But that’s not what Chuck (it’s theatrical name) is at all. No, Chuck Wepner is a real guy and was a real fighter. At…

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REVIEW: David Lynch: The Art Life [2017]

“They got along like Ike and Mike” If you remember back to 2007, a documentary entitled Lynch came out portraying an all-access pass into the creative process of auteur David Lynch‘s final feature-length film, Inland Empire. There was a lot of smoke and mirrors surrounding its release from the use of a nom de plume where the director was concerned (some even speculated it was Lynch himself at the time) to the notion of a collective known as the Lynch Three Project. This film became “One” with a short named…

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REVIEW: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City [2017]

“If you can understand a city, then that city is dead” The 1960s were a hotbed of activism by necessity. You had civil rights battles for racial and gender equality, protests standing in opposition of new wars coming down the pipeline after just finishing one that risked destroying everything, and America’s growing wealth disparity reaching an apex yet to be solved even today. You had an expanding populace surviving domestically in cities that were falling apart and in desperate need of resuscitation. Suddenly the “first world” hit a decision point…

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REVIEW: A Quiet Passion [2017]

“Give me something pressed from truth” I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who never heard the name Emily Dickinson, although I’m probably not alone insofar as being ignorant to her work. For someone as prolific as the Amherst, Massachusetts-born poet with approximately 1,800 poems to her name, I’m sure I’ve heard at least a few over the years. Like many revered artists ahead of their time, however, only a dozen were published before she died of Bright’s disease at age fifty-five. It would therefore be easy to fashion…

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REVIEW: The Lost City of Z [2017]

“We are all made from the same clay” I should have known The Lost City of Z wasn’t to be your regular old adventure picture of men on an expedition since James Gray was at the helm. He’s always been one for character studies delving deeper than the situation at hand to hit upon the emotional and psychological duress exhibited within. So even though he left New York City’s small-scale locale behind (as if The Immigrant could ever be called small-scale with its gorgeous period detail), the jungles of Brazil…

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REVIEW: Tommy’s Honour [2017]

“A man’s got to use every club he has” I’ve never been one for golf—playing or watching. I know many who feel the same and many of those who found themselves becoming fans during Tiger Woods’ heyday anyway. You can’t blame them for it either. Celebrity, national pride, and the excitement surrounding both are tough to combat. The draw therefore became peoples’ desire to see what Tiger did: which tournaments he won, who he beat, and by what margin. Golf became secondary to this hero’s allure like many other sports…

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REVIEW: Life, Animated [2016]

“Just your voice” It’s 2017 and yet I’m pretty sure you think about one of two things when hearing the word autism: Rain Man or vaccination. This is a shame because it only helps bolster the stigma assigned to the disorder. Pop culture has latched onto the “spectrum” with multiple examples of Asperger’s syndrome, but full-blown autism remains relegated to a nightmare scenario instead. So just imagine what Ron and Cornelia Suskind must have thought during the early nineties when their son Owen was officially diagnosed. Hardly a few years…

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REVIEW: La Femme et la TGV [2016]

“I’ve never sent an internet and I never will” While its age-old conceit of a misunderstood curmudgeon discovering joy after being perpetually caught in a cycle of monotony is familiar, Timo von Gunten‘s cutely inspiring La femme et le TGV is in fact based on true events. The woman at its center is Elise (Jane Birkin), a baker left alone after her husband passed on, her son (Mathieu Bisson‘s Pierre) moved away, and her clientele gradually enticed by a cheap German bakery with unbeatable prices. She rides her bike to…

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REVIEW: Joe’s Violin [2016]

“How long can you live with memories?” You never know when a potential story will come your way. For Kahane Cooperman it was on her drive to work around New York City while listening to WQXR. The station was calling for used instruments to be donated for children and schools in need, a story about how they already received one from a ninety-one year old Holocaust survivor piquing Cooperman’s interest. An adventure to discover who this man was and how he acquired the violin began that ultimately led her to…

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REVIEW: Neruda [2016]

“He’s the king of love” Pablo Neruda was a Chilean legend. He was a poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, a diplomat holding multiple posts including that of Senator for the Communist Party, and ultimately so feared by President González Videla and President Augusto Pinochet that his death is rumored to have been murder hidden underneath a cancer diagnosis. It’s a diverse and implausible life that could just as easily have been fiction rather than the reality it was. He rallied together a country desperate to…

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REVIEW: Lion [2016]

“Did you really look for my mum?” The Weinstein Company is lucky Google hasn’t moved into the film production game yet like tech giant Amazon (unless you count YouTube Red) or else they may not have secured the rights to one of 2016’s most upliftingly heart-wrenching movies of the year in Lion. We’re probably lucky too because had Google found a way to produce the true story of Saroo Brierley‘s improbable search themselves, a lot more time may have been spent on Google Earth’s role rather than the more pressing…

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