REVIEW: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug [2013]

“I could have anything down my trousers” There is a certain charm to the middle section of a book where characters met start to come into their own before the big climax. It’s a crucial section, one its bookends need to truly succeed. However, when a single work of fiction is stretched and divided into three acts, this portion will inevitably prove anticlimactic when isolated from the rest. Peter Jackson and company are sadly not immune to this truth while attempting to model J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit after his Lord…

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REVIEW: Hævnen [In a Better World] [2010]

“Not if you hit hard enough the first time” Heaven. Hell. Life. Death. We live within an existence that holds those four words as gospel. We strive to be good in hope for salvation while the threat of eternal damnation lingers just close enough to fear. Wars—whether big or small, on an international scale or a familial one—make us choose sides. We pick allegiances and create enemies where one might never have been. To be good means there is evil; without one, we could never understand the meaning of the…

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REVIEW: Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick [Everlasting Moments] [2008]

“No one ever died of a bit of the belt” What a gorgeous poster, and frankly a gorgeous film despite its hard look at love conquering abuse, alcoholism, and the shattering of dreams. Sometimes two people find themselves forgiving each other, not out of weakness, but out of the underlying powerful love bonding them. Academy Award nominee Jan Troell’s new film Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick, or Everlasting Moments here in the states, is a slow unveiling of what it was like to live in Sweden as a below Middle Class…

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