Movie Reviews

Killing Faith

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  • Title: Killing Faith
  • IMDb: link

Set in the equally bleak surroundings of mid-19th Century Arizona, Killing Faith follows the unlikely group of a freed slave (DeWanda Wise), her passing daughter (Emily Katherine Ford), a drug-abusing doctor (Guy Pearce), and a half-wit (Jack Alcott) on a five day journey from the town they are no longer accepted to a neighboring one which they hope will lead to salvation.

At the center of the film, although without any lines of her own, is the young girl who is a carrier of the plague ravaging the area. Some, including her mother, believe the child has been infected by the Devil leading to the supernatural overtones of the movie (which are more subtle than you would expect, accepting only by the poorly educated and fearful of the Western territory) and the religious conversations between the mother and the doctor (haunted by the loss of his own daughter to the same disease).

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One Battle After Another

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  • Title: One Battle After Another
  • IMDb: link

Strongly inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, which Paul Thomas Anderson has been attempting to adapt, on and off, for more than two decades, One Battle After Another tackles a litany of themes including revolution, government corruption, interracial couples and racism, and the generational divide between a father and a daughter.

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Eleanor The Great

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  • Title: Eleanor The Great
  • IMDb: link

Eleanor The Great is a story about love, loss, the lies we tell others, and the lies we tell ourselves while struggling through grief and searching for connection and meaning in this crazy ride we call life. We first meet the goodhearted truth-bending Eleanor (June Squibb) in Florida before her return to New York, for the first time in decades, after the death of her longtime friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). Living with the daughter (Jessica Hecht) she doesn’t get along with, and struggling for connection, Eleanor walks into a room which will change her life.

Mistaken for a Holocaust survivor, Eleanor shares Bessie’s story as her own finding a new community and a new friend in a college student (Erin Kellyman) struggling with the recent death of her mother, and the growing distance with her father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who becomes interested in sharing Eleanor’s story unaware of the lie which holds all of it together.

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Apollo 13

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  • Title: Apollo 13
  • IMDb: link

“Houston, we have a problem.”

Re-released (for the first time in IMAX) to celebrate the film’s 30th Anniversary, director Ron Howard‘s 1995 film based on the real events surrounding the flight of NASA’s Apollo 13 is arguably his best (I’d put it neck-and-neck with the underrated Frost/Nixon.) Casting Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon as the three astronauts whose mission to the moon goes horribly wrong and Gary Sinise, Ed Harris, and Chris Ellis as those in Mission Control who help bring them home, Apollo 13 is a tense drama where knowing beforehand the ending somehow (despite all logic) doesn’t hurt it’s climactic final act.

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