I was 14 years old in the summer of 1981 following my freshman year in high school. I had started to discover who I am and had already established my interest in computers and programming courtesy of the terminals we used to connect to a university’s mainframe computer via a telephone line. I went to […]

Rarely do I wish that a rumored casting decision favored the other person than the actor in the finished production. The Indiana Jones films would be quite different if Tom Selleck had put on the famous fedora. Even worse, Eric Stoltz was on his way to assuming the role of Marty McFly in the Back […]

A struggling 14 year-old finds solace and support at a local water park in the coming-of-age film The Way, Way Back. In the 1979 film Meatballs, Bill Murray‘s character (a camp counselor) says to a new arrival, “You must be the short depressed kid we ordered.” That film was another coming-of-age story involving another disconnected […]

William Shakespeare‘s classic comedic play is reimagined by Joss Whedon in the latest version of Much Ado About Nothing. This famous tale has been the inspiration for countless romantic comedies over the years while the main play itself was adapted for the screen in 1993 by Kenneth Branagh. This time around, Joss Whedon of Buffy […]

The conflict between Jews and Arabs has been going on for so long that problems are just expected and dealt with on a daily basis in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. Such friction is made even worse when a trusted citizen becomes the target of hatred and prejudice after events that implicate him in […]

Channing Tatum as a would-be Secret Service agent and Jamie Foxx as the President in need of protection star in the new action film White House Down. This action thriller starts off a bit story-heavy by introducing us to John Cale (Tatum), a U.S. Capitol cop trying to make the leap over to the Secret […]

I love movies that take me someplace that I will never go or introduce a lifestyle that is markedly foreign because I can take that journey from the comfort of a theater seat. Fill the Void is that type of movie because it sets things firmly in an ultra-Orthodox community in Tel Aviv for a […]

A young Hasidic Israeli girl has to balance her dreams and desires against the pressures of her family and faith in Fill the Void. This is the film that represented the country at this year’s Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film — though it didn’t win. The film is written by Rama Burshtein, a native New York […]

A freshly-recruited agent from a top-flight private intelligence company goes deep undercover to infiltrate an eco-terrorist group in The East. Relative newcomer Brit Marling, last seen as the daughter in Arbitrage and also the recent The Company You Keep, stars as an undercover agent named Sarah who is assigned by her boss (Patricia Clarkson) to gain the trust […]

Three 15-year-olds spend their summer building a makeshift house in the woods and find themselves along the way in the coming-of-age tale The Kings of Summer. Back in 1979, my closest friends and I scoured the landscape to collect every type of building material we could get our hands on. The goal was to build […]

A heartless mob hit man plies his daily trade of death and dismemberment while also managing to keep his job a secret from his wife and two daughters in the true story of The Iceman. Richard Kuklinski was a monster the likes of which the world has rarely produced. Here was an individual who, due […]

Unfortunately, history almost always loses out to creativity when money’s on the line. That appears to be the case here.