Just in time for college football bowl games and the NFL playoffs, Concussion tells the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), the Nigerian-born forensic pathologist who discovered and named chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of several recently deceased NFL … Continue reading CONCUSSION
David O. Russell’s latest, Joy, tells the story of Joy Mangano, an American inventor best known for her self-wringing Miracle Mop. Well, sort of. Joy is partly about how Joy Mangano became Joy Mangano, but it’s also about how family just likes to … Continue reading JOY
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore. Howard Beale, Network Well, maybe not. The Big Short is director and co-writer Adam McKay’s run at an All the President’s Men or Network, and though it comes up short *cough cough* … Continue reading THE BIG SHORT
America in the 1970s was not exactly abundant with optimism. The tragic death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert on Dec. 6, 1969, cast a dark shadow over the free love and hippy counterculture of the ’60s. Then … Continue reading STAR WARS IV: A NEW HOPE
Images hold a very special place in the mind of the viewer. Simultaneously of a time and timeless, objective and subjective, images bring forth textures and dimensions often lost in memory that can reduce the complex into simplistic categories of … Continue reading Arielle Nóbile on Legacy Connection Films
The Danish Girl is easily director Tom Hooper’s most interesting movie, though that doesn’t say very much. Dramatizing the world’s first known gender reassignment surgery, Hooper explores the story from an intimate setting, concerning himself largely with the marital plight of … Continue reading THE DANISH GIRL
I want to tell you a story about a story,” writer/director/performance artist Laurie Anderson tells the audience. She recounts the time she spent in the hospital as a child after breaking her back. Anderson tells it in a rather typical … Continue reading HEART OF A DOG
By its very nature, cinema is a collaborative art. As Orson Welles said, “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.” To whom then does a movie belong? In his 1954 essay, … Continue reading HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT
Spike Lee is many things; subtle is not one of them. In 1989—with three movies under his belt—the Brooklyn-based producer/director exploded on to a grand stage with Do the Right Thing. The movie stirred the pot and caused a fair amount of … Continue reading CHI-RAQ
Michael J. Cinema 
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