Movies
Jason and the Argonauts
HARRYHAUSEN IN THE HOUSE Tom Hanks put it best: “Everybody thinks that Citizen Kane was the greatest movie ever made. But if you were young in 1963, you know the real answer is Jason and the Argonauts.” Prepare to meet the Children of the Hydras Teeth!
The Impossible
OSCAR NOMINEE, BEST LEAD ACTRESS No washout, this based-on-a-true-story of a vacationing British family (headed by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor) caught in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is technologically a marvel the tsunami experience is harrowingly believable but also emotionally rich. I hesitate to use this term,
Hyde Park on Hudson
GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINEE, BEST ACTOR I always suspected that Bill Murray would make a great president, and this film in which he portrays Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, on the eve of WWII, is welcoming the visiting King and Queen of England, battling polio and juggling a complicated love life
Horse Feathers
THE IDES OF MARX Hello, I must be going because I dont know what The Marx Brothers were thinking when they conceived this exercise in higher-education hilarity, but whatever it is, Im against it.
Holy Motors
BEST FILM OF THE YEAR INDIEWIRE, FILM COMMENT, CAHIERS DU CINEMA The years biggest must-see/cant-comprehend movie “is weird and wonderful, rich and strange barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
NOMINATED FOR THREE OSCARS Now we know why Hobbits eat all those extra meals to make it through the running time of Peter Jackson movies! Seriously though, this return to Middle Earth is everything you wished for a fantasy with the power to haunt your dreams. (Rolling Stone)
Duck Soup
THE IDES OF MARX It baffles me that everyone spends so much time praising Chaplins The Great Dictator when the Marx Brothers anarchic anti-fascist farce is so much more biting. Arguably the funniest movie ever made only Dr. Strangelove matches its audacity in sending up the follies of nationalism and
Django Unchained
The D may be silent, but the guns seldom are in Tarantinos epic antebellum revenge saga. See it with someone who wants to stick it to the man. The slave-sploitation classic Mandingo a key influence on Django plays Mar 30!
Clash of the Titans
HARRYHAUSEN IN THE HOUSE Forget that the bloated, tedious, overly-CGId remake ever happened and release the Kraken of your imagination with this grand and glorious romantic adventure (Roger Ebert) that finds equal magic in a titanic sea monster and a friendly clockwork owl.
Anna Karenina
NOMINATED FOR FOUR OSCARS In adapting Tolstoys timeless tale of destructive, forbidden love, director Wright (Atonement) and screenwriter Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love) have bested the numerous film versions that came before, delivering an erotic charge and a deliberate artificiality that works a strange and marvelous spell. (Rolling Stone)