Charles Dickens romances a young, would-be actress who becomes his last great love in The Invisible Woman. In the second half of the 19th Century, Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) was the toast of England (and the world) as its most successful living author. For all the good his fame brought, what it couldn’t elevate was […]
A tactical mission in Afghanistan to eliminate a top Taliban target goes awry in Lone Survivor. On June 11, 1963, a Vietnamese monk sat down at a busy Saigon intersection and chose to be burned alive as a protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. The monk sat motionless while he […]
A highly motivated stockbroker rises from neophyte to Nero in The Wolf of Wall Street. With all the more recent news about Wall Street excess, it’s sometimes easy to forget the myriad of scandals that came before. In the ’80s and ’90s, we had crooks like Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and, of course, the folks […]
Iconic studio head Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) needs all the magic he can muster to win the screen rights to Mary Poppins in Saving Mr. Banks. The classic tale of the magical title character comes from a series of best-selling stories by English author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson). Mrs. Travers (as she insisted on being called) […]
A elderly woman and a stodgy former government adviser join forces to track down the son she gave up for adoption years before in Philomena. In the 1950s, a young woman in Ireland let herself experience a moment of carnal joy, only to find herself pregnant, alone and ostracized. Social tenets of the day drove Philomena Lee (Judi […]
A Texas cowboy has to confront the risks of his devil-may-care lifestyle when he contracts HIV in Dallas Buyers Club. The genesis of HIV and AIDS awareness represented one of the ugliest chapters of our recent history. It sprang onto the national spotlight around 1984 and was so misunderstood that it was originally stigmatized with […]
The most successful world heavyweight boxing champion of all time faces his biggest challenger — the United States government — in the HBO film Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight. In late February of 1964, a brash and recently unimpressive young boxer predicted — quite emphatically — that he was going to not only beat the current rock of a heavyweight champion, Sonny […]
Slavery has been addressed by so many movies and television shows over the years. Many of those stories have their origin in books, as in Roots, while others are entirely fictional and original, as in the recent Django Unchained. It’s rare for a seemingly new story to be unearthed and adapted into a movie. Such […]
A free black man from New York is kidnapped and sold into slavery in 12 Years a Slave. Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an avid violinist, is living with his wife and young children in 1841 when he’s offered a compelling musical opportunity in Washington, DC. Eager for any chance to better their position in life, […]
In recent months, Benedict Cumberbatch has taken on two iconic characters. In one movie, he plays an arrogant, creepy, powerful man with superhuman abilities, a deliberate way of speaking and an unusual look who wants to expose the lies of leaders in order to benefit his people and ultimately ends up confined to minimal living quarters […]
An outcast rogue hacker turns his skills to exposing the world’s biggest corporate and political secrets, ushering in a new era of information freedom in The Fifth Estate. This is the true-life story detailing the origins of one of the most powerful grassroots organizations the world has ever seen — WikiLeaks — and its founder, the quirky, […]
An American cargo ship is boarded by Somali pirates who take its captain hostage in the true-life tale of Captain Phillips. In April of 2009, the Maersk Alabama set sail from Oman, Jordan, with 17,000 metric tons of cargo bound for Mombasa, Kenya. Their route took them directly through an area where Somali pirates had been known […]