Malik’s Movie Reviews Past & Present
‘You confuse love with admiration.’ Can I stop right there? Please? Alright, I’ll write a full review… No surprise why so many actors/artists/Hollywood types love this one. The original Dark Knight, Michael Keaton, stars as a past his prime movie star who tries to return to relevancy by staging a Broadway play. The rest of […]
For better in this case, I knew next to nothing about Alan Turing going into ‘The Imitation Game’, so I could watch this film with fresh eyes. The Cumberbatch headlines an all star English cast in this story of a man who is considered the father of the computer. Set in World War II England, […]
One of the lead horses for Best Picture. No one can deny the ambition or not be impressed that Linklater actually pulled this off. I don’t remember who I should credit for this but I think it’s true: where you’re at in life directly impacts how you take ‘Boyhood’ in. If you’re close to having […]
Robert Duvall is nominated this year for playing the title character in this courtroom drama. The strong patriarch with three sons with different personalities, a death on a fishing boat, Robert Friggin Duvall; impossible not to draw comparisons to ‘The Godfather’. I’d still like to see Duvall, Robert Downey Jr, and Vincent D’Onofrio in an […]
I loved this one! There’s always one ‘really small’ movie that doesn’t have a big enough machine behind it to really win Best Picture, but five years later we may look back on it as the Best Picture of the year. ‘Whiplash’ is that movie this year. I know I’m biased as a hypercompetitive narcisstic […]
Jennifer Aniston’s run to the Oscar stage came up short, but she still establishes some dramatic cred carrying this feature. The story of this one is a woman with a debilitating back injury, stuck in the mental place between pushing herself to full recovery or wallowing in depression. Her depression in part centers on an […]
Reese Witherspoon carries this film based on a true story, about a young woman who hikes across the Mojave Desert. That by itself isn’t much of a story, the hike is a metaphor for this young woman’s transition from a turbulent childhood to young adulthood and attempting to turn her life around before it’s too […]
Some roles and movies feel like they would only work if one person played the lead role. It’s hard for me to see anyone but Bill Murray as the title character of this film. As in ‘Lost in Translation’, the role of Vincent comes across a lot as in alternate universe version of Bill […]
Not so fast Amy Adams and Jessica Chastain… Like most of you, I’ve been a fan of Julianne Moore since Boogie Nights (at least). If ‘Still Alice’ gets her the Lifetime Achievement Oscar, I won’t be mad. The film is about a brilliant professor who is diagnosed with early on set Alzheimer’s. Off of […]
How timely. I mean, it’s always been a ripe issue for the movies (going back to ‘Citizen Kane’), but as social media has become a perfect tool for forcing the issue, it’s really become a hot debate: who decides what is ‘newsworthy’? And from there: where’s the line between reporting/documenting what you see, and creating/instigating the […]
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