Widows
Director: Steve McQueen
Writers: Steve McQueen, Gillian Flynn
Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Carrie Coon, Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Rated R | 129 Minutes
Release Date: November 16, 2018

Steve McQueen‘s Widows is not just a heist film. It’s a heist film with an empowering message, wrapped with social issues that continue to affect us today. It’s a phenomenal piece of work featuring women of color taking back the power. Though it has familiar heist tropes, Widows has plenty of depth, as well as twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat. Check out my full review below.

It’s been five years since we’ve seen anything from Academy Award-winning Steve McQueen. But the director is now back and with fearless female cast. In Widows, Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Ervio play a group of women who have suffered the loss of their husbands. The only problem is, they have secrets to hide, leaving these widows with a debt owed to a dangerous group of people.

Check out the latest trailer here below.

The Godfather, which is not only one of the greatest mob movies ever made but also one of the greatest American films ever made regardless of genre, celebrates its 45th anniversary this week.

Premiering only in New York City on March 15, 1972 and then opening nationwide on March 24th, 1972, The Godfather remains a true bonafide classic in every sense of the word. The film’s rich storytelling, which is based on the original story by famed literary scribe Mario Puzo, almost borderlines on pulp fiction, yet is raised to a level of fine art by the surefooted and sharp and watchful eye of director and mastermind Francis Ford Coppola. Add to that the cinematography by Gordon Willis, which put blacks and whites and shades into a pioneering new light; the memorable, sweeping music, led by the iconic theme song; the acting by an ensemble cast led by Marlon Brando and supported by actors who wound up becoming legends in their own right, The Godfather is many things to many people and a masterpiece of a film to all.

Network, the 1976 powerhouse of a motion picture, in which its statements on national and world politics, Hollywood, the television industry, and the human population in general resonate more relevant in today’s age than ever before, celebrates its 40th anniversary this week.

Directed by Sidney Lumet, with an Academy Award-winning screenplay written by the genius small and big screen writer Paddy Chayefsky, Network, originally released on November 27th, 1976, doesn’t pull any punches whatsoever, in terms of its script, narrative, themes and especially its performances. Faye Dunaway leads an ensemble group of Hollywood’s finest, including William Holden, Ned Beatty, and Robert Duvall, all of whom explode across the screen while naturally spouting dialogue of the highest intellectual and emotional order.

M*A*S*H, the 1970 satirical black comedy, which dipped a poison pen in so many sacred cows that had been pretty much off limits and taboo in cinema before it, celebrated its 45th anniversary on January 25th, 2015.

Set during the Korean War of the 1950s, M*A*S*H had right on its sleeve an allegorical backdrop to so many current events of the late 1960s such as Vietnam, life in general during that tumultuous time, and anti-establishment sentiments, feelings, and bents. Done sometimes with an almost cinema verite documentary style, one of the end results of the unique approach taken by the directorial maverick film legend Robert Altman, M*A*S*H was the kind of film that had been unseen before in Hollywood. Running with an almost ragtag, loose visual style, it’s almost voyeuristic in the ways we see the comedy in the film and the film in general, and there are plenty of laughs: ranging from slapstick to witty to punny to sublime and ridiculous, there’s all styles and temperatures, from cool to downright raunchy in some respects. Eyebrows must have certainly been raised when the old guard audience of old guard Hollywood first laid their peepers on the film at certain sequences without question. But all the while, it’s the kind of film that is sort of winking at everyone and everything, 100 percent conscious of what it is; there’s a reverberating feeling that hits the tinderbox every time and creates incendiary types of experiences for the viewer when they watch it.