Struggle to be family
{mosimage}One of the most useless and common complaints about the movies is that they’re not like real life. It’s like complaining that the water is wet, or exercise makes you tired.
Juno has strong pro-life message
The titular Juno is an unwed teen (a marvelous performance by young Ellen Page) who finds herself pregnant after, more or less, seducing her shy classmate Paulie (Michael Cera).
Street Kings is self-delusional
Movie tackles doubt, hope, despair and faith without sentimentality
{mosimage}It's not often that an explicitly Christian movie, indeed an explicitly Catholic one, escapes the toxic treacle of sentimentality and nostalgia or the pompous pedantry of polemics. Henry Poole is Here tackles miracles, faith, hope, doubt, despair and the difference Christ makes in real lives with straightforward honesty, intelligence and heart.
It's a good movie.
Hollywood's summer of morality
{mosimage}The first big summer blockbuster movie was about an enormous, morally neutral, ravenous shark who arrived on a New England beach ready to punish everything from skinny dipping to political hypocrisy and capitalist greed. Jaws was big, loud, spectacular and scary.
In the 33 years since Steven Spielberg’s most original film, directors have dedicated each summer to overwhelming our senses, scaring us silly and making a pile of cash out of young audiences on vacation.
Innocence among the horror
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a great movie that brings a fresh look at the degradation of Nazi concentration camp prisoners through the eyes of a German child. This powerful film is definitely worth seeing.
Debunking the Pius XII myths
“Working on this project the past two years has been an eye-opening experience,” said David Naglieri, the film’s writer and producer. “I came to understand that the black legend surrounding Pope Pius XII is, in fact, founded upon distortion and lies and that Pius XII was directly responsible for saving tens of thousands of Jews.”
Bringing family values back to Hollywood
That Capra-like embrace of American ideals includes the film’s PG rating. Just weeks before New In Town’s Jan. 30 release, the movie was recut to remove mild profanities and avoid a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America .
The Innocent Oscars
Old, mad Blake seems to haunt Hollywood this Oscar season. Each of the five films nominated for best picture in the 81st running of the Academy Awards Feb. 22 tells a story of innocence and experience — of how we pass from trust to terror, and what we lose and what we gain when we learn the truth about the world and our role in it.
The story behind the Irish invasion of 1847
But the story of how that impacted the city of 20,000 and its wave of new citizens who fled from a deadly typhus outbreak and the potato famine of 1845 to 1851 in their Irish homeland has gone untold for more than a century, now to be uncovered in a docudrama called Death or Canada: Fleeing the Famine . It will air on History Television March 16.
Holocaust survivor spreads anti-bullying message through film
Stronger than Fire, by Toronto filmmaker Don Gray, captures the powerful tale of Eva Olsson, an 84-year-old woman from Bracebridge, Ont., who discovered a passion for speaking to students more than 12 years ago. She began facing her past after one of her three grandchildren convinced her to do a short presentation at her school.