The Final Take with Parker Mott

Lincoln roams the ruins of Petersburg at the climax of the American Civil War in Steven Spielberg's masterful "Lincoln".

Lincoln is a bold and monumental achievement in filmmaking craftsmanship, and solidifies two irrefutable outcomes: Daniel Day-Lewis will win Best Actor at the Oscars for his role as the United States’s 16th president, and Janusz Kaminski will also take the Academy’s accolade for Cinematography. Both add depth, intrigue, and beauty to what may be Steven Spielberg’s finest, or at least most assured film. Its humanity and politics are remarkably brilliant. (continue reading…)

Dreama Walker is the victim of a twisted prank call in "Compliance".

Compliance dramatizes a concept that has always fascinated me: humanity’s tragic will to conform to a perceived higher power. We can do unspeakable things all to yield to authority. Authority, be it political, institutional or judicial, is bestowed with this indisputable power. It controls and indoctrinates. Us lay people can so easily back down to the ‘system’ that we defy our own common sense. Because the authorities are sworn to protect and serve, right? (continue reading…)

THE MASTERPIECE COLLECTION
Notorious, 1946 (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
(101 minutes)

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman battle their love and the one for their country in "Notorious".

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious is known as a seminal piece of the spy genre, the melodrama of all melodramas that cued the arrival of the first James Bond movie in 1962 – Terence Young’s Dr. No. For my money, espionage is not the preemptive element of Notorious, for Hitchcock never waded through just one genre. Those who deem him a horror filmmaker are grossly misinformed, because here lies a romance between two people whose amour is compromised by their duties for their country and, more importantly, their misunderstandings of each other. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(103 minutes)

Randall Adams is one of the interviewees in Errol Morris's extraordinary "The Thin Blue Line".

“But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll, The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll, O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.”
– Tommy by Rudyard Kipling

In The Thin Blue Line, its title is not spoken until we are deep inside its mysteries. It comes from a prosecutor, who says bluntly that the police are “the thin blue line separating society and anarchy”. It’s an outrageous statement, but it’s said in a film that would require a stoic to not get a little outraged. The documentary is an intensely sprawling, complex, untidy, and ambiguous thread that coils around a murder case that’s answers could never be ensnared. The murder was so cold and abrupt no one could make sense of it, or maybe didn’t want to. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(125 minutes)

Ameena Matthews mediates an argument in Steve James's "The Interrupters".

The Interrupters is a gentle, sad, and openly honest documentary about giving, and all it asks for in return is our awareness. It spans a year where director Steve James – responsible for the extraordinarily ambitious Hoop Dreams – rigorously documented the anti-violence group the Violence Interrupters in the South Side of Chicago. I’ve driven by the South Side once. I saw glimpses of barred and boarded up windows, impoverished streets, and decaying backyards. To me, it was a ghost town and a place that only existed in nightmares. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(133 minutes)

Billy Beane (Pitt) and Peter Brand (Hill) observe batting practice in Moneyball.

In Moneyball, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, told his team that baseball is a game of blackjack. Funny how the daring choices Beane made were like blackjack too: he had cards in his hands but who knows if they would add up to twenty-one. Regardless, every deal Beane would double down and spare the insurance. Moneyball is about the cards dealt after and Beane’s uncertainty if they amounted to a blackjack. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(151 minutes)

John Mark Byers consoles his wife outside the courthouse in this stellar, gut-wrenching documentary.

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills is a documentary about a trial that makes you want to scream for all the wrong and right reasons. Three murder suspects were given their justice and, as we are taught, justice is good. But how the verdict was decided is what makes the trial of the West Memphis 3 a tragedy in the courtroom, where justice may have been served but perhaps too carelessly. Paradise Lost examines, on a figurative note, the death of impartiality. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(139 minutes)

Expect feeling over truth in The Tree of Life.

In The Tree of Life we have a director – Terrence Malick (Badlands, The Thin Red Line) – who creates his own Film of Genesis. He describes the profound and paradoxical ways of life through an ineffable cinematic meditation. It’s a cosmic film that could mean so much, and then more. It’s a lovely, riveting meander through time exploring the cosmos in relation to a small and ordinary life of the O’Brien family. They live in suburban Texas in the 1950s, a common time and milieu in Malick’s films as this was where and when he was raised. It is the family, in particular one of the sons, who we follow as they endure life’s ways of nature and grace. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(171 minutes)

The fallen angels of C Company in The Thin Red Line.

The Thin Red Line is not a war movie. Instead of being a clear representation of World War 2 it takes place out of time in some exotic, unknown space in some sort of beautifully haunting reverie. Instead of showing soldiers fighting rigorously on the battlefield, it studies them and their thoughts that exist outside of the action. Well, this is not about soldiers but fallen angels. This is not about war is hell but that war is a passage through heaven on the way to hell. The film is majestic, with each frame being tarnished by the surrounding madness and chaos, descending upon the natural world. Okay, the surface of The Thin Red Line is a war movie but it exists at higher ground, about ideas instead of what it is like to pull the trigger. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(122 minutes)
REVIEW WRITTEN IN 2008

The Stones take a bow in Shine A Light.

Shine A Light does more than remind us how good the Rolling Stones were. It’s a film that captures every movement, highlight, reaction of a concert alas helmed by venerable director Martin Scorsese. He is not new to the musical genre. He did The Last Waltz in 1978 on The Band’s last concert ever after a 16 year journey. He also did a music video for the song “Bad” by Michael Jackson in 1995, and finally, his well-known documentary on Bob Dylan called No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. After winning his first Best Picture at the Oscars in 2006 for The Departed, Martin Scorsese still is continuing to deliver some of his greater flicks in recent times. (continue reading…)