In February 2008, 15-year-old Larry King, an openly gay boy, was shot in the back of the head twice by Brandon McInerney, his 14-year-old classmate. They were in the computer lab of their junior high school in Oxnard, California when Brandon stood up …Read more
Don’t be fooled by the title. “Brightest Star” is a surprisingly lusterless look at the frustrations of a recent college grad. Some times it seems like director Maggie Kiley is taking those frustrations—the grad can’t get over his ex or find a job …Read more
If the new book “And Every Single One Was Someone” is any indication, we tend to prefer poetic representations of the Holocaust over challenging ones. The book’s 1,250 pages are filled with six million iterations of the word “Jew” and nothing else. I …Read more
That “Summer in February” begins with a pristine shot of the English coast and good-looking fellows riding horseback along its surf, all to the swells of Benjamin Wallfisch’s string-ridden score, says a lot about why the romantic drama is a complete …Read more
In an it’s not-what-you-think moment of Shane Ryan’s ramble through madness, “My Name is A by Anonymous”, a teenage girl sits alone on her bed. She’s played by Russian pop-singer Teona Dolnikova whose dark, liquid eyes do enough silent work to convey …Read more
What you say can be less important than how you say it, which puts “Truth” at a big disadvantage. Yes, honesty and frankness go well together. There are only so many ways to say things like “I’m gay” and the best way might be the most straightforward …Read more
Some of the ideas rearing their fearsome heads in “Like Father, Like Son”, that biological ties earn a child optimal love from its parents among them, fall into the category of dumb, but powerful. It’s not that you judge the stupefaction of Ryota and …Read more
George Orwell once wrote that “every book is a failure.” I think that probably every film is, too. But that doesn’t mean director Margarethe von Trotta hasn’t accomplished something remarkable with “Hannah Arendt,” a vibrant biopic of the controversi …Read more
It’s hard to remember that intimacy is often neck in neck with shutting down. When people open up with each other, we’re like fish, just as ready to flip above the surface of the water as we are to dive back down beneath it, into the deep where other …Read more
Battles around education can be many things, crushing, monumental, confounding, and impassioned among them. But rarely are they simplistic. That’s where “We the Parents” is a bit of a let down. The documentary forgoes a political intimacy with its co …Read more