REVIEW: Motherless Brooklyn [2019]

I’m chasing his footsteps. Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) was more than a boss to Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton). This man plucked him out of an orphanage wherein the nuns beat him because they believed his Tourette syndrome was a sign of wavering faith. Frank taught Lionel that anyone using God’s name to harm a child isn’t someone worth listening to, took him under his wing, and hired him (along with three other orphans in Bobby Cannavale‘s Tony, Dallas Roberts‘ Danny, and Ethan Suplee‘s Gilbert) as a gumshoe for his private…

Read More

REVIEW: Mayhem [2017]

I just wanted the corner office. If you’ve ever worked an office job wherein every single one of your bosses has been promoted above his/her aptitude, you know what futility feels like. You slave away at your cubicle to reach beyond your pay grade only to have someone that knows nothing about what you do—or worse, throws you under the bus for something you’ve never even heard about—derail everything with the stroke of a pen or click of a button. What’s your recourse? Unless they stupidly cc’d you on the…

Read More

REVIEW: My Friend Dahmer [2017]

Smiles up. When someone kills seventeen people over a thirteen-year span with words like necrophilia and cannibalism circling each murder, sympathy for the predator—not his prey—is neither the first nor hundred and first emotion that should come to anyone’s mind. I’m not certain there could be room for anything but disgust whether you’re a stranger, a family member, or an old friend reading the news. And yet we try to find motivation nonetheless. We wonder about how someone could become such a monster right under our nose without ever suspecting…

Read More

TIFF13 REVIEW: Dallas Buyers Club [2013]

“I prefer to die with my boots on” How do you stretch having thirty days left to live into seven years? You put in the work. Ron Woodroff (Matthew McConaughey) didn’t journey towards opening up the Dallas Buyers Club in order to stage a revolution against the FDA—he simply sought to prolong his own life. Director Jean-Marc Vallée’s film depicts this evolution as Woodruff’s homophobic cowboy becomes a champion of the LGBT community and a leader in the fight against government AIDS profiteering. It’s a story twenty years in the…

Read More

REVIEW: The Grey [2012]

“Live and die on this day” Struggling to find meaning in a life of solitude by punishing himself to self-exile in a desolate world caught between the pristine white backdrop of untouched snow and the turbulent mass of flesh populating it as a refuge from decent society, Ottway (Liam Neeson) wonders if the time has come to retire. Writing a note to the woman he loves but can no longer see except in memory, he recalls a poem from his childhood and wonders if his fight has led him to…

Read More