Joseph Gordon-Levitt is disillusioned idealist Edward Snowden in Snowden (2016), Oliver Stone’s drama about the controversial NSA whistleblower. Framed by the famous meeting in a Hong Kong hotel room where Snowden (played with modest integrity by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) shared top-secret files revealing illegal surveillance programs with journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and documentarian Laura Poitras […]
Mark Wahlberg is Mickey Ward, The Fighter (2010) of the title in this true-life late-career comeback story. The younger half-brother of could-have-been contender Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), the man who once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard and is now wasting away as twitchy crack addict lost in fantasies of his own comeback, Mickey is the […]
Homicide: Life on the Street: The Complete Series (Shout! Factory) Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) earned its reputation as the best show on TV during its run in the 1990s from the very beginning. In the pilot episode, “Gone For Goode,” rookie detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) walks into the squad room of Baltimore’s […]
This weekend marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, a natural disaster compounded by insufficient defenses and a disastrous response by the government. Looking for a proper way to mark the occasion? Amazon Prime and HBO subscribers have two very good options. Treme, David Simon’s follow-up to The Wire, is beautifully […]
