Tag: Tom Hanks
In this Netflix movie we see a retelling of the bestselling Frederick Backman novel, A Man Called Ove, set in Pittsburgh instead of Sweden and with cultural shifts in narrative. Themes of aging, loneliness and depression from the loss of one’s soulmate, isolation and feelings of irrelevance from forced retirement all play front and center...
Elvis–Rocket Man of the 60’s?
In Baz Luhrmann’s Academy-award nominated 2022 biopic of Elvis Presley (an extraordinary performance by newcomer Austin Butler), we see the journey back in time to the 1940’s through 70’s with historically accurate fashions, scenes, and most of all, politics through the civil rights movement. Elvis’s life is told from the...
“News of the World”–A Gift for the Heart
News of the World is based on the Paulette Jiles’s bestseller by the same name. The story follows a sixty-something curmudgeonly widower, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a traveling newspaper reader. Captain Kidd entertains and informs townspeople–some of whom are illiterate– in small communities all...
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a dramatization of the real-life friendship between the beloved Fred Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003) and the investigative reporter, Lloyd Vogel (a pseudonym for Tom Junod.). Vogel (played by Emmy winner Matthew Rhys of “The Americans”), is a journalist known for...
“The Post”–High Stakes
Perhaps no other film this year captures two important political moments of our time: the issue of fake news and “me too”, the invisibility of women’s voices, until they were not. The Post is high-stakes filmmaking. Released this month, The Post is already receiving wide-ranging, intensely opposing reviews.
The Post...
The Circle– A Cautionary Tale
[David Spiselman is guest blogger for this review and author of CypherGhost, Book 7 of the Spies Lie series, an Amazon bestseller, under his pen name D.S. Kane].
The Circle, based upon the 2013 bestselling novel by Dave Eggers, is a flawed movie but an important one. The Circle is the first movie to explore the balance between openness...