Drama

Saving Mr. Banks

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Saving Mr. Banks
  • IMDB: link

Saving Mr. BanksWritten by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, and based off pieces of the life of P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), Saving Mr. Banks is half of a really good film. The story is broken into flashbacks of Travers’ childhood and decades later when Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) was attempting to buy the rights from the author’s children’s books to make Mary Poppins.

Although there is much to enjoy in the later Disney years (despite the oversimplification of Travers’ stubbornness) the film gets bogged down in the weight of the constant flashbacks which may offer a peek at the real story that first created Mary Poppins on the page but ignores much of the life story of the woman who wrote her.

The scenes involving the young Travers’ () drunken but imaginative father (Colin Farrell), troubled mother (Ruth Wilson), and larger-than-life aunt (Rachel Griffiths) fall in the realm of Dinsey-ized melancholy, but the scenes in California between the equally stubborn Disney and Travers provide its magic.

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American Hustle

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: American Hustle
  • IMDB: link

American HustleFor this 70’s tale of con men (Christian Bale and Amy Adams) in over their heads writer/director David O. Russell reunites with Silver Linings Playbook stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Part character study, part insane and over-the-top adventure, American Hustle offers audiences one of the year’s best films.

After a brief introduction to Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) and his mistress and co-conspirator Sydney (Adams), the pair are busted by up-and-coming FBI hot-head Richie DiMaso (Cooper) who decides to use the pair to pull in even bigger fish. Regardless of danger or consequences, and against the orders of his boss (Louis C.K.), DiMaso pushes Irving and Sydney into going after both the mob and local politicians, beginning with Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) who is interested in rebuilding Atlantic City.

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Captain Phillips

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Captain Phillips
  • IMDB: link

Captain PhillipsBased on a true story, Tom Hanks stars as Captain Richard Phillips whose cargo ship was hijacked in April of 2009 while making a supply run down the Somali coast to Mombasa, Kenya. The latest from director Paul Greengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray (who adapted Phillips’ own accounts for the film) can be broken up nearly equally into two halves. The first-half of the film deals with the set-up, rising tension, and attack of the Somali pirates (Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali). It’s here Greengrass is at his best with the focus on the looming attack and its immediate aftermath.

The film’s second-half, although still well-made, lacks the same focus as the pirates kidnap Phillips and the cargo ship’s lifeboat in hopes of ransoming the captain to make up for the less than profitable venture. From here Captain Phillips jumps around quite a bit from Phillips’ captivity, to the Naval Destroyer called in to deal with the situation, to the crew still aboard the cargo ship, and finally to the SEAL team eventually called on to bring an end to the situation.

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Philomena

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Philomena
  • IMDB: link

PhilomenaBased on a true story, Philomena involves the odd pairing of a former journalist turned disgraced government advisor and elderly Irish woman on a road trip to discover what happened to the child that was taken from her nearly 50 years ago. Although initially not interested in a human interest piece, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) finds himself drawn into Philomena Lee’s (Judi Dench) story of her forced labor at a convent decades earlier whose nuns sold her child, and those of several other unwed mothers, into adoption for 1000 pounds.

Beginning at the convent, whose inability to help Sixsmith is immediately suspicious of, the pair eventually travel to Washington, D.C. in a search that will give the old woman some insight into the man her son became. Centered around Dench’s performance and the saintly, but not cheesy or overly sentimental, character of Philomena, the film could have easily fallen into the worst kind of TV movie of the week melodrama. Instead Stephen Frears chooses to make a straightforward drama that works well (despite its over-reliance on the odd couple dynamic).

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12 Years a Slave

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: 12 Years a Slave
  • IMDB: link

12 Years a SlaveBased on the memoirs of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free New England man kidnapped and forced into slavery for 12 years while visiting Washington, D.C., the historical drama from director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley is an accounting of those experiences and the long road Northup takes to make it home to his wife and children. It’s often not an easy film to watch but it is an example of exceptional filmmaking that mark it as one of the best films of 2013.

Any discussion of the film must begin with Chiwetel Ejiofor, a longtime favorite of mine. Ejiofor’s terrific performance of a man caught-up in events and circumstances far beyond his control, struggling with loosing hope or ever seeing his family again while doing what he must to survive, is a brilliant piece of acting. Against the harshness of the events which surround his character, Ejiofor’s humanity shines through as a witness to the sin of slavery. Without what he’s able to bring to the role the stark honesty of McQueen’s film would be difficult to endure.

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