Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 49
BURBANK, Calif.—Children under seven years old can no longer watch some of the old Disney films on the Disney+ streaming platform. Their accounts have recently been blocked from accessing a list of films that are deemed culturally questionable. The Disney Company’s first move to be culturally sensitive, started last October, when they created an initiative called “Stories Matter” to address racially offensive or stereotyped images and themes in their old stock movies. Movies currently affected include “Dumbo” (which incl...
BURBANK, Calif.-As media offerings in Indigenous languages increase, The Walt Disney Company has joined the team. Those who have the Disney+ streaming service can now see "Finding Nemo" and "Star Wars: A New Hope" in the Navajo language. In 2013, Navajo language speakers joined Lucasfilms forces to bring "Star Wars: A New Hope" to locations across the Navajo Nation. The effort took three years to complete. In 2016, Pixar films decided to follow suite and brought "Finding...
He hath shown thee, O man, what is good: and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? -Micah 6:8 Just Mercy is based on the lives of two black men: Harvard-educated lawyer Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan), who started the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative. The organization was designed to provide free legal assistance to death row inmates, far too many of whom could not afford a lawyer to...
Los Angeles, Calif.-At the Academy Awards on February 9, 2020, Taiki Waititi was the first person of Maori descent to win an Oscar, and was the first indigenous person to be nominated in the adapted screenplay category. Waititi was the writer-director-actor for the movie "JojoRabbit." Though Waititi was not a First Nations or Native American, he used his win in the American annual high-profile event to draw attention to Indigenous people all over. "I want to dedicate this to...
There's not much to do in Chinle, Arizona besides play basketball or do drugs. Everyone in town knows where to find the purveyors of both activities; in an early scene in Basketball or Nothing, Chinle High School Athletic Director Shaun Martin shows us the overpass under which the meth heads like to hang out, and the stakes are crystal clear. The Chinle boys' basketball team doesn't just provide an outlet for this small group of high schoolers, it's an alternative to despair...
Most gangster movies, though they involve people doing terrible things like selling drugs and murdering competitors, are built on a Judeo-Christian ethic-for instance, the scene in "The Godfather" where Michael Corleone's thugs kill off his enemies while he attends his nephew's baptism and becomes, in two senses of the word, the godfather. The main characters in these kind of movies tell themselves that they have good reasons for their evil actions-they are taking care of...
When Indian Horse opens on a Native family fleeing with white settlers in a canoe, you'd be excused for thinking this takes place several hundred years ago. After his brother dies and his parents leave to seek a Christian burial for their child, Saul Indian Horse and his grandmother struggle to survive the harsh Canadian winter. It's not until a '50s era Ford rolls into the frame that the actual time period becomes clear; this is taking place decades, not centuries, ago. The...
Alfonso Cuarón is one of my favorite directors. He made the best Harry Potter films, The Prisoner of Azkaban; the fantastic and memorable Children of Men, which is, at least on one level, a retelling of the Christmas story, and the thrilling, head-spinning Gravity. These movies are so different from each other, it's basically impossible to pin down a signature style or trademark. Cuarón just makes great films, plain and simple. Roma, a domestic drama about a middle-class M...
Sweet Country is a ponderous, brutal, and powerful movie about life in the Australian Outback in the 1920s. It is a very fine piece of filmmaking that I recommend with caution: those who have experienced trauma will find plenty of triggers here. This is a tragedy. From the very beginning, there's a sense of dread hanging over every scene, a feeling that something bad will happen-it's inevitable, and no one can do anything about it. You almost don't want anything good to...
There's a decent movie buried under the mess that is Paul, Apostle of Christ. There might even be two decent movies here. The trouble is, first-time director Andrew Hyatt and the filmmakers at Affirm Films can't decide which of these movies to make, and trying to cram all of them and then some extra stuff into less than two hours just doesn't work. There are hints of an interesting character study of the author of more than half of the New Testament. Luke (Jim Caviezel, who...
First Reformed is a puzzling, provocative, powerful movie. Ethan Hawke stars as Ernst Toller, the rector of a very small, very old Dutch Reformed church somewhere in upstate New York. About ten people attend his Sunday services, and Hawke's time is mostly occupied with giving tours of the historical church grounds-including its expansive graveyard and secret compartment where escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad sought refuge-and selling souvenirs (the pastor across...
Same Kind of Different as Me Same Kind of Different as Me is a movie clearly made with a lot of love, but not a lot of skill. It's based on the true story of the friendship between Ron Hall, a wealthy Texas art dealer, and Denver Moore, a homeless black man. The two have traveled the country, and, according to the credits sequence, raised more than $85 million to help the homeless, so I'd assume they know how to tell a powerful, moving story. Unfortunately, director Michael...
It took me a while to get ahold of the narrative tone of The Hostiles, because, when it opens on a white family living alone on the frontier in 1892, I saw trespassers-not good honest people. And when the landowners ride up to ask you what you're doing on their land, and you answer the door with a gun in your hand, well, you can't really expect them to be very neighborly. But then it's made clear that these aren't the "good" Indians, these are the kind who kill children....
Te Ata feels like a Hallmark production, if Hallmark were ever even slightly willing to be critical of the United States government and its Indian policies. It is a well-meaning tribute to Chickasaw storyteller Mary Francis Thompson, whose stage name was Te Ata. According to the film, that name means "Bearer of the Morning," and her grandmother gave it to her when she was a baby because she wailed so loudly at dawn. Thompson (Q'orianka Kilcher) grew up in Oklahoma in the early...
While Fences was released on Christmas Day in 2016, our reviewer, Will Krischke, feels if you haven't seen it yet-or even if you have-it's a perfect movie to pop into your DVD player or stream at any time. As it opens, Fences feels like it's going to be a film about overt systemic racism in the '50s. Troy (Denzel Washington) plays a garbage man who has complained, perhaps a little too loudly, about how black folks are always on the back of the truck while white folks are...
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO (ANS—September 10, 2017) I remember how heart-broken I was in May 2016 when 11-year old Ashlynne Mike was found murdered and violated on the Navajo Reservation. That morning I had awakend to an Amber Alert. I then followed the story of Ashlynne’s abduction throughout the day until her body was found near Shiprock, New Mexico. Later, I took part in a vigil at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, celebrating her life and coming to terms with the reality of assault on Native American women around the cou...
The Wind River Reservation is in Wyoming, about halfway between Casper and Jackson. My parents live in Casper, though I didn't grow up there and don't know the area very well. My dad, however, works for USDA Wildlife services in Wyoming, and the main character in Wind River would also work for USDAWS, if the film had its facts straight (Director/Writer Taylor Sheridan has him working for Fish & Wildlife, but they don't shoot coyotes who kill sheep. That's my dad's job.) All...
HOLLYWOOD, CA-"I'm so grateful to represent my people, my culture and my language," says Eugene Brave Rock Eugene Brave Rock has been travelling the world, chasing his dream of making it big in Hollywood since he was 17. Now, with a role in the box office smash Wonder Woman, Brave Rock is breaking new ground in his career. He's also become a hometown hero for the Blood Tribe in southern Alberta, where he was born and raised. "It's overwhelming, but it's great," said Brave...
So here's the thing we've got to keep in mind: the bar for Wonder Woman is ridiculously low. After the total disaster that was Batman v. Superman, the exercise in tastelessness that was Suicide Squad, and the extremely questionable choices of Man of Steel, all we really want is a DC Comics movie that doesn't suck. Like a gambling addict on a losing streak, we keep ponying back up to the table, ever more desperately convinced that our luck will change eventually. In my...
The Shack Starring Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, Graham Greene, Avraham Aviv Alush, Sumire Matsubara In The Shack, Sam Worthington plays a guy named Mack, who, after a family tragedy, is angry at God while also not sure if God exists. I think plenty of people can identify with that feeling. When things happen to us that are hard to bear or don't make sense, our first reaction is to blame God. And God rarely comes to His own defense. But this time God does show up. Mack...
La La Land Hidden Figures La La Land "La La Land" seems to barely exist as a movie. It is so light and breezy, so stocked with nostalgia and whimsy, dream sequences, and references to other movies; it feels like it might be that one movie everyone thinks they saw that never actually existed. Was that even real, or did I dream it? If it was real, it starred Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, two young hopefuls in the city of lights, waiting for their big break. Stone wants to be an...
When he was a young man in West Virginia, Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) made a vow to God that he would never touch a gun or intentionally hurt another human being. In "Hacksaw Ridge" there are two incidents that inspire that vow-one, when he is a young boy and hits his brother with a rock. For a few terrible moments, he thinks he's killed him. Then, when he is a teenager, he takes a gun away from his drunken, abusive, self-loathing father (Hugo Weaving) and almost uses it...
Drunktown's Finest Deepwater Horizon "Drunktown's Finest" is set in the fictional town of Dry Lake, New Mexico, which is pretty clearly a stand-in for Gallup, New Mexico. If you're familiar with Gallup, there'll be plenty of local landmarks you'll recognize. I saw a motel I stayed in once. Gallup/Dry Lake is right on the edge of the Navajo reservation and the movie is about three different Navajos who go back and forth between dominant culture in the city and Navajo culture...
Kubo and the Two Strings "If you must blink,..." "If you must blink, do it now." That's the first line of "Kubo and the Two Strings, spoken over a dark screen, and it's good advice, because what follows is a visual feast that you won't want to take your eyes off for even a second. Director Travis Knight and the LAIKA animation team have seamlessly blended stop motion and digital animation to create a movie that doesn't look like any other. Young Kubo is a storyteller with the...
"If you miss the first half of the movie, you're not really missing much...." If you go see "Free State of Jones," go ahead and take your time getting popcorn and soda pop. If you miss the first half of the movie, you're not really missing much. It's a pretty standard re-telling of the Robin Hood myth, set in Mississippi at the tail end of the Civil War. The beats were so predictable, it proceeded so methodically, that my eyelids grew heavy. Matthew McConaughey plays a...
