Film Reviews

EDITOR’S NOTE: To any reader who has not seen The Force Awakens, this review strives to discuss the quality and worthiness of the film in broad strokes, without giving away specific plot points or story revelations. Details mentioned apply only to the earliest set-up elements of the story. Enjoy. New Millenium, Same Falcon by Andrew […]

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Songs and Selves by Andrew Collins Author John Green has achieved two great literary accomplishments in his body of work. The first is his repeated creation of authentic child-poets – characters who are dreamers of dreams, philosophers in essence, but definitely still 21st century teenagers. Second, and wonderfully embodied in his novel Paper Towns, is […]

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Whatever Remains by Andrew Collins Like any good mystery, Mr. Holmes (released on DVD Nov. 10) is complex and multi-layered. Like any good story, the plot builds slowly and steadily in emotional intensity, like a rising swell that washes over us, weighty with revelations. It most likely won’t be the film you expect, but it most […]

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Spark in the Darkness by Andrew Collins If there’s any sort of literary progression from A Walk to Remember to The Fault in our Stars, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl represents the next stage of stories about a young woman who gets cancer. It’s one of the best films in […]

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Merely Marvelous by Andrew Collins Writer and director Joss Whedon is in his usual fine form at the helm of Avengers: Age of Ultron, but even his storytelling prowess can’t quite hold the film’s many strands together. Let’s start with an example. Early in the film Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olson), who begins the film as […]

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Machina ex Deus by Andrew Collins We live in a time when technology is advancing at a frightening rate – self driving cars, algorithms that write news stories, big data growing at exponential rates. And yet alongside such technological progress, racial tensions still linger to an ugly, frightening degree – as we’ve seen in Ferguson, the […]

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Rage Against the Dying by Andrew Collins “For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled,” writes Carl Sagan in his book The Pale Blue Dot. “Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: ‘I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love […]

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Man, Scientist, Enigma by Andrew Collins Whenever the silver screen needs a brilliant, troubled, eccentric protagonist, Benedict Cumberbatch will be there to play the part — consider the hit BBC TV series Sherlock, last year’s The Fifth Estate, and now The Imitation Game. In this case he portrays Alan Turing, the World War II-era British mathematician tasked with […]

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Headed for Destruction by James Roland Anthony Buckley found treasure in a dusty Pittsburgh warehouse. His journey spanned two years and three countries as he searched storage areas in New York, London, and Dublin before finally tracking down Wake in Fright, a film that he’d edited forty years before. From a large box labeled “For […]

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Eius Paenitentiam  by Andrew Collins The Drop (in theaters) is a dark look back into a world whose Godfather-esque heyday has passed yet continues to linger in New York City’s neighborhoods. Generations stack up upon each other and forge deep family ties. Cops and mobsters attend Mass every morning. Money changes hands unseen, according to a secret […]

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