Author: Jeff Mitchell

The best of the 2018 Sedona International Film Festival

Jeff Mitchell

Sedona, Arizona truly is a one-of-a-kind locale, and its dreamy, red sandstone buttes and peaks speckled around a pleasant community bequeath thoughts of wonder and sincere happiness of simply existing on Planet Earth.   When stepping foot in Sedona – located about two hours north of Phoenix – one should definitely plan plenty of outdoor activities to embrace the surreal beauty, but there is one event that can happily keep you indoors for hours and hours at a time, the Sedona International Film Festival. After spending five days at the festival,…

The spy film ‘Red Sparrow’ flies in some twisty, some meandering directions

Jeff Mitchell

“Red Sparrow” – After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many Western Europeans and Americans – hoped for a less adversarial relationship with their/our former communist foe, Russia.  Sure, Russia technically is a democracy, but a sketchy one, and after recent shenanigans in 2016, this aforementioned “former-enemy” certainly is not behaving like a nation wanting to cozy up as best friends with the West.  Far from it. As Bob Dylan preached in his 1964 song “With God on Our Side”: “I’ve learned to…

‘Annihilation’ horrifically demolishes old boundaries

Jeff Mitchell

“Annihilation” – Nobody. Nobody comes back. Nobody comes back after entering The Shimmer. Actually one person does come back, and now, Lena (Natalie Portman), a doctor – who also spent seven years in the United States Army – feels compelled to enter it.  In doing so, she takes movie audiences on a sometimes beautiful, but mostly a deeply unsettling, nightmarish journey in writer/director Alex Garland’s (“Ex Machina” (2014)) visionary science fiction stunner. The Shimmer is a bizarre phenomenon, a growing permeable force field, created by a meteor that landed near an…