Evangelical Christians are focus of ‘Waiting for Armageddon.’
By turns frightening, fascinating and eye-opening, the documentary “Waiting for Armageddon” offers much to rouse followers of various religious and political stripes. Though the film’s structure may hang on the biblically foretold, world-destroying-then-renewing phases of Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon and Millennium, the piece also serves as an absorbing snapshot of America’s highly influential, reportedly 50-million-strong evangelical Christian movement.
This adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance isn’t always true to the letter of life.
Dear Reader, I’m so sorry, gulp, but “Dear John” is like a very bad relationship with a very beautiful someone: You want it to work, you truly do, but the pain, the guilt, the boredom, the CW soundtrack . . . .
It includes such classics as ‘The Third Man’ and ‘The Fallen Idol’ and lesser-known ones such as ‘Brighton Rock’ and ‘It Always Rains on Sunday.’
To everything there is a season, and this is incontestably the time for a newly minted, previously unexamined genre called Brit Noir.
Also reviewed: ‘Frozen’ and ‘Shinjuku Incident.’
Joining “From Paris With Love” in U.S. theaters this weekend is “District 13: Ultimatum,” more frenzied action from style-conscious Gallic popcorn impresario Luc Besson, and a follow-up to 2004’s “District B13.” That cult hit (directed by “From Paris With Love’s” Pierre Morel) took the reality of France’s immigrant unrest and devised a future Paris in which the government has cynically walled off the most gang-infested and racially charged ghettos.
“The Last Station” is a paean to the enduring power of both love and that long list of irritations between couples who’ve spent a lifetime together. Newly Oscar-nominated Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren as writer Leo Tolstoy and wife Sofya create such an authentic sense of long-suffering affection that it’s easy to imagine that life off-screen. But Tolstoy’s estate is a bitter issue, with Sofya intent on leaving the rights to his works to their children and the writer planning on giving them to the Russian people. There’s a fine supporting cast, including James McAvoy as a Tolstoy acolyte and Paul Giamatti as an advisor. The film captures the struggles of a great mind troubled by fame and tormented by his wife.
It’s presumed the Oscar will go to the best performance, so the supporting actress nominee is letting her work speak for itself.
“Everything is up on the screen.”
Mel Gibson chose a solid comeback vehicle for his return to top-line acting after nearly eight years away — a well-written revenge thriller with a strong supporting cast led by Ray Winstone.
Moviegoers off to see the new Mel Gibson movie “Edge of Darkness,” a compressed two-hour version of the six-hour 1985 British TV miniseries, are likely to be doing so because their man Mel is back on the edge, on the boil and on the trigger after nearly eight years off as a top-lined screen actor. (“Signs” was his most recent starring role.)
Oscar winner Andrea Arnold captures disaffected youth in a broken home.
Mia is 15, all elbows and anger, going at her life in a rundown apartment complex in Essex as if it were one long skirmish in British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s exceptionally well-crafted drama, “Fish Tank.”
The writer-director’s debut feature film, about what’s left in the wake of the black power movement, delves into her interest in ‘the price you pay for dedication to a political movement.’
Writer-director Tanya Hamilton is interested in the way you can find yourself in a mess and then spend a lifetime working your way out. That is the hand she has dealt Marcus, “The Hurt Locker’s” Anthony Mackie, in “Night Catches Us,” her first feature film, which is now generating buyer interest after Sundance audiences embraced it over the weekend.
Renegade angels can’t save Scott Stewart’s mess of an apocalyptic tale.
The new end-of-days horror/action flick “Legion” sports a premise in which God is so over humankind that it’s everything-must-go time for the planet’s inhabitants. Too bad the supreme beings who decide what movies get made in Hollywood aren’t yet fed up themselves with their own generated pestilence: tired, loud, dumb time-wasters like this.