During the holiday/awards season, most “prestige” films aim big–big messages, big emotions, big spectacle, big casts, and especially big running times. Based on a true story, The Impossible centers on the devastating spectacle of the 2004 tsunami, specifically on how it caught up and separated a real Spanish family vacationing in Thailand. And in doing [...]

I’m almost envious of a movie-goer approaching Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey with no fore-knowledge of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels or Jackson’s previous The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Not because they have such sumptuous treats of adventurous imagination ahead of them to discover, though I suppose that’d be nice. But to [...]