Tag: Movie

Difficult not to love ‘Loveless’, a stunning and equally bleak film

Jeff Mitchell

“Loveless” – One of the more common statistics floating “out there” – spoken at happy hours, bake sales and around water coolers – is that half of marriages end in divorce.  The collective “they” might be right, because according to Google, the U.S. divorce rate is 41 and 60 percent for first and second marriages, respectively. Looking at divorce globally, an Oct. 18, 2017 article in The Telegraph, a UK newspaper, states that Maldives has the highest such rate in the world.  The United States?  We rank fifth. Well, Russia…

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ offers many positives, but not enough space for its story

Jeff Mitchell

“A Wrinkle in Time” – Madeleine L’Engle wrote the science fiction, young adult novel “A Wrinkle in Time” back in 1962, but this critic was not familiar with the source material at all when walking into a Tempe, Arizona movie theatre to see director Ava DuVernay’s film adaptation in 2018.   The movie poster looks engaging though, as a blonde-haired Oprah Winfrey, a red-headed Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling sport appealing, celestial looks, and with the promise of time wrinkling in the film title, some out-of-world concepts are sure to appear…

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…