Tag: Grace

  • Oscars 2020 — Who Should Win (Part Two)

    Oscars 2020 — Who Should Win (Part Two)

    Welcome to part two of our Oscar picks! Here’s part one if you missed it: Oscars 2020 – Who Should Win? (Part One) Remember, these aren’t the movies that will win, these are the movies that should win. Here are our picks for the most coveted categories of the night…   Best Supporting Actress  …

  • Novitiate / Hostiles / Call Me by Your Name

    Novitiate / Hostiles / Call Me by Your Name

    Welcome to another edition of Mini-Review Roundup where we present smaller reviews of several movies at once. Up this month: Novitiate, Hostiles, and Call Me by Your Name.   Novitiate   Nothing scares me more than a movie about faith. I’ll take a tank full of sharks over watching the foundation of my life butchered…

  • Mudbound

    Mudbound

    As a child, like many others, I loved to play in the mud. We had a “sandpile” next to our barn that was about 25% sand with the rest dirt, which is to say it was mud as it was in the north shadow of our big, old, red barn. I would spend hours playing…

  • The Shape of Water

    The Shape of Water

    You’d be forgiven for writing off Guillermo del Toro as just another genre director. Entries like Hellboy, Blade Runner II, Pacific Rim, and Crimson Peak fit neatly in that vein. But if you really want to uncover del Toro’s heart, look no further than 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth. The film has been described as an “adult…

  • Lady Bird

    Lady Bird

    Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Oscar season. After a dismal year at the movies, studios have saved their best for last. December boasts the most hopefuls, but November has a trick up its sleeve: a little indie called Lady Bird. Greta Gerwig isn’t a household name, but you’ve seen her before. She’s acted in roles…

  • Mother!

    Mother!

    Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! abounds with religious metaphors as well as social commentary via cryptic symbolism impossible to definitively decipher. A mishmash of surreal imagery combines with increasingly compounding absurdity that drives our extremely visceral experience and nearly plot-less depiction of a woman’s gradual psychological unraveling as she struggles to restore her idyllic rustic house after…

  • Sing

    Sing

    Buster Moon desperately wants to save his theater… and himself. When he was a young koala, his parents took him to see a stage production in which a sensational Suffolk sheep named Nana Noodleman (voiced by Jennifer Hudson) sang about “finding a way home…” and “carrying a weight” as she performed a graceful, operatic rendition…

  • Manchester by the Sea

    Manchester by the Sea

    We’ve been looking forward to Manchester by the Sea since January when it took Sundance by storm. Now, 11 months later, the film is everywhere and it was worth the wait. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, best known for 2000’s You Can Count on Me, has crafted a masterful meditation on grief and regret. Casey Affleck plays Lee,…

  • Genius

    Genius

    There is a tendency, in this human nature of ours, to distill a thing into what we consider its most fundamental. Sex becomes pleasure, knowledge becomes a recitation of facts, culture becomes equitable with skin color. These derivations all seem essential in some ways, but, through this distillation, we lose the whole and are left…

  • Hell or High Water

    Hell or High Water

    Tim is on vacation this month which paved the way for a special guest on our show: Jason Thompson. Jason joins Jon to discuss the new film Hell or High Water starring Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges. The movie, directed by David Mackenzie, tells the story of two brothers on a bank robbing spree and…