Category: Drama

  • The Past (2013)

    Asghar Farhadi burst on the international stage with 2011’s Oscar-winning A Separation, but he was making accomplished films in his native Iran well before the rest of the world took notice. Case in point is The Past, a brutally effectivre exploration of domestic crisis. It begins as Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns to Paris after four…

  • Baby It’s You (1983)

    Writer-director John Sayles has a gift for taking the most cliché-riddled formula and then – voila! – skirting cliché. Such is the redemptive power of full-blooded characterization and an understanding that people are unpredictable. Baby It’s You is a modest story of young love, but it nicely illustrates the filmmaker’s knack for wringing genuine complexity from what otherwise could…

  • Bright Lights, Big City (1988)

    “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.” –Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City. Alfred Hitchcock said he preferred making movies adapted from marginal novels instead of top-shelf literature. The latter, he reasoned, already had been defined in an artistic medium that…

  • The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

    If this rags-to-riches tale wasn’t true, you’d think it was the invention of the world’s sappiest motivational speaker. Chris Gardner, penniless and homeless in the early 1980s, remained committed to caring for his young son while working toward a career as a stockbroker. It’s stuff tailor-made for an inspirational Hollywood flick, and it is a…

  • Serpico (1973)

    Serpico is gritty. It’s rough around the edges. It’s mired in an on-the-mean-streets-of-New York-in the-1970s vibe. In short, it’s a Sidney Lumet movie. Al Pacino delivers an indelible, iconic performances as Frank Serpico, the real-life undercover cop who blew the whistle on widespread New York City police corruption in the early ‘70s. The movie begins with…

  • Elegy (2008)

    Adaptations of Philip Roth novels don’t generally fare well on the big screen (Goodbye Columbus, anyone?), but Elegy is the rare beast that gets it just about right. Based on Roth’s The Dying Animal, about an aging college professor grappling with inner demons and an obsession with a younger woman, Elegy avoids the pitfalls typically…

  • Approved for Adoption (2012)

    Jung was 5 years old and wandering a South Korean street by himself when he was found by a policeman. The Western world awaited; the boy would be among more than 200,000 Korean children adopted in the aftermath of the Korean War. In May 1971, a Belgian family brought Jung Henin home. “It was like…

  • Boyhood (2014)

    The swooning of critics over Boyhood upon its theatrical release reached near-embarrassing heights. There’s no getting around it; this is a remarkable movie and a testament to the singular vision of writer-director Richard Linklater. And while that doesn’t make Boyhood an unqualified triumph, its minor deficiencies are more than made up for by its overall…