Spoiler Scale (How spoilery is this article on a scale of 1 to 10?):  3 Out of all of the “prestige” projects that inundated movie goers in 2014, actress/co-producer Jessica Chastain’s “labor of love,” The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, is a hell of a lot more ambitious than Jennifer Aniston’s Cake or Reese Witherspoon’s Wild.  Following in the footsteps of ... Read More »

Spoiler Scale (How spoilery is this article on a scale of 1 to 10?): 4 Writer/director J.C. Chandor burst onto the scene with Margin Call (2011), which dramatized a 24-hour period in 2008 when the major players at a New York brokerage firm realized (or could no longer ignore) that they had built their house of cards on snake oil.  ... Read More »

Spoiler Scale (How spoilery is this article on a scale of 1 to 10?): 2 As the modern god (or devil) of middlebrow cinema, writer/director Christopher Nolan’s primary strength (or weakness) is his penchant for abbreviating the narrative beats.  And this aspect is indispensable (or overdone) in his latest film, Interstellar, where time is relative and characters need to traverse galaxies ... Read More »

Spoiler Scale (How spoilery is this article on a scale of 1 to 10?):  3   Director Steven Spielberg has often been accused of making “emotionally manipulative” films, to which he responds (to paraphrase) – that’s the whole point of making a movie.  That said, the relevant question behind a very legitimate criticism of Spielberg’s films is not whether a film is manipulative, but how the filmmaker chooses ... Read More »