Nancy Keefe Rhodes covers film, photo and visual arts for the City Eagle. She has written "Make it Snappy" since December 2006, a weekly film column reviewing both current theatrical releases and DVDs recent and enduring. She is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. She archives her film reviews at www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.
It’s not what you expect after the trailer, which ran all through the holidays at Carousel Mall Regal Cinemas and on TV too, promising “vintage” Clint Eastwood, with him cocking his thumb Dirty Harry-style and, later, ordering gangbangers off his lawn with an M-1 rifle. No, at the end of Gran Torino, I found myself thinking that this sometimes violent movie is about the ways men still find to be tender with each another...
You might remember Robert De Niro as the drill instructor in "Men of Honor," bellowing that line, willing Cuba Gooding, Jr. to his feet, “Stand up, Navy diver!”
George Tilman, Jr., hasn’t directed a film since 2000, when his Men of Honor portrayed the struggles of Carl Brashear, the first African American to successfully enter the ranks of deep sea Navy divers. So there’s plenty of anticipation now that his new film is about to open in wide release this Friday. That film is another biopic, "Notorious," which relates the saga of Christopher Wallace – better known as The Notorious B.I.G. – and promises to vividly reanimate some aspects of the mid-90s Hip-Hop era. Notorious B.I.G...
[The CNY chapter of the Irish-American Cultural Institute screens Ken Loach's award-winning film on Feb. 10th at 7:00 PM at the Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church on Jamesville Road in DeWitt as the second film in this year's Irish film festival. This review originally appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 3/2/07, the date of the film's limited release in the U.S.]
Director Ken Loach’s film about Ireland’s convulsions in the early 1920s arrives on US shores nearly a year after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. ”The Wind That Shakes the Barley” depicts one stage in the birth of the modern Irish state, including the island’s partition by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, through the lives of fictional brothers Damien and Teddy O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney)...
