EVERY MOVIE HAS A LESSON

by Don Shanahan

Posts tagged Tim Roth

It is time to go on record and add another label to the colorful list to describe filmmaker Quentin Tarantino: "acquired taste." Even with his recent success, the auteur's excessive and aestheticized indulgences are catching up to him. Each subsequent film of his may be getting more popular, but they are not getting better and "The Hateful Eight" hammers that point home. Swelled to either a 167-minute straight cut or a 187-minute opus complete with overture and intermission, Tarantino's newest film doesn't know when to quit. It just goes and dies, literally and figuratively.

MOVIE REVIEW: Selma

"Selma," whose name echoes the history being told, is one of those films that gets history right, honors it, entertains you without sacrificing the real thing, and moves you to no end. Anchored by an amazing lead performance from David Oyelowo as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Selma" has the ability to break and shatter the hardest of souls, thicken your pulse, and devour your tissue box. The experience is entirely worth all of that trouble. Best of all, it earn that emotion from you. Dare I say, "Selma" might be even better than last year's Best Picture winner "12 Years a Slave." That's the level of impact we're talking about.