Edward Snowden is director Oliver Stone’s kind of hero: a zealous patriot who becomes disillusioned about his beloved country, publicly criticizes it, is labeled a traitor, and eventually learns a more complex definition of what it means to be patriotic. Stone has been down this road before – with the young Vietnam-era soldiers of Platoon and Born…
If you’re in the DC area, you can pick up a copy of the Washington City Paper and find my review of Parkland, a new movie about the JFK assassination by journalist-turned-director Peter Landesman. I’ll also be publishing my interview with him over the weekend. For now, here is a snippet of the review: Each…
This morning, The Atlantic published an article I wrote as part of their online content. It is an analysis of the hypocrisies of the new film, Hyde Park on Hudson, in which I examine the ways the film claims to value the privacy of our elected leaders – while simultaneously exploiting that privacy to make…
This week, the AV Club rolled out its list of the best 50 movies of the 1990s. As with any list of this kind, there is much room for debate. It is not a definitive list – as if such a thing exists. It was compiled through a blind ballot vote of the site’s film-writing…
“Savages,” the new candy-coated thriller from once-important director Oliver Stone, comes along at a propitious time. The film is about a bloody feud between a Mexican drug cartel and domestic marijuana growers, but the subject lurking throughout is the War on Drugs, which has been in the news quite a bit lately. First there was…
This is the first in a series of posts about “Movies that Matter.” In this space, I will analyze movies that have influenced public policy and discuss the techniques used by the filmmakers to create that impact. First up, Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” In the acclaimed 2005 documentary, “Why We Fight,” the filmmakers open and close…
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