The Savages Is Another Authentically Messy Achievement From Tamara Jenkins

Who exactly are the titular family of The Savages? Well, they're an eclectic group mostly consisting of a father, Lenny (Phillip Bosco) and two adult children named Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), with Wendy serving as the stories protagonist. Both Wendy and Jon are trying their best to muddle through their lives when they get the news that their distant father is having extreme issues related to a newly formed case of Dementia in Arizona on the other side of the country. Wendy and Jon bring their father back to their neck of the woods in Buffalo, New York and set him up in a nursing home. As she tries to chart a course for where her life needs to go, Wendy decides to live with Jon so that she can be nearby if their father has any issues.

Breach Starts Out Rough Before Finding A More Comfortable Suspenseful Groove

Eventually, the 2007 thriller Breach gets pretty darn good, but you gotta wade through a pretty weak first act to get there. But once it actually gets into a groove that writer/director Billy Ray (the guy behind last years better than expected military drama Thank You For Your Service) seems more comfortable with, Breach finally becomes something more akin to (though not as wholly successful as) the suspenseful political thrillers of the 1970's it's clearly mimicking. Like that subgenre of American cinema, Breach is based on a true story of corrupt American politics, specifically the saga of Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), an intellegence officer at the FBI that is being secretly spied on by Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe).

The First Season Of Ozark Is A Plodding Disaster

What a strange creature Ozark is. I spent a little over ten whole hours watching the entire first season of this tv show and looking over the entire show, one thing becomes clear above all else; this program is a mess. Not the kind of mess that results from being too ambitious and flying too close to the sun, no, this is the lazy kind of mess where it's obvious the producers and writers behind this show were just looking at all the various trends cropping up in American television dramas (namely, following the white male anti-hero protagonist model Breaking Bad and Mad Men popularized) and smushed them into one program. The result is something as derivative as it is muddled since it seems to miss any chance to acquire the sort of depth that made the far better shows it's clearly influenced by so, well, great.

Sully Struggles To Land On A Purpose For Being

It was supposed to be just another flight. Just a couple of hours in the air, no biggie. The pilots had done this before, the passengers had done this before, it's just a little air travel. And then dual-engine loss occurred, leaving the folks in charge of this aircraft only a few precious minutes to figure out what just happened and what course of action to take next. Piloting this particular plane was Chesley Sullenberger (Tom Hanks), or Sully, who, after realizing they can't make it to a nearby airport, decided to make the bold move of landing the plane on the Hudson River.

The Squid And The Whale Review (Classic Write-Up)

Family Ties

Divorce is a massively tremendous event in any families life. No matter how old you are, no matter how much you think you're prepared for it, no one is ready for the level of change divorce brings. Noah Baumbach, the director of The Squid And The Whale, uses divorce as a catalyst to upend the life of one family driven by intellectualism, a trait especially salient in the case of the father, Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and the oldest son, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg).