"What have you been up to in your little zoo?"

It appears that we have been due for one of those untold stories amid the many tales of courage and bravery both fact and fiction, real and imagined, that have been told of the World War II era. There have been plenty of the battlefield hero films that include last year's exceptional Hacksaw Ridge from Mel Gibson. Then there are the quiet and unlikely heroes. These are people who did incredible things that were often unknown during the war and often even after it was all over. Schindler's List has become the gold standard for these kinds of emotional war movies. The Zookeeper's Wife is set in the mold of that kind of a film, telling essentially that very kind of tale. Here the action begins with the invasion of Poland, which was the spark that ignited a local territorial conflict into a global event. It is here at the moment of that spark we find Antonina Zabinski, played by Jessica Chastain, who used her small local zoo to save nearly 300 Jews from the Nazi extermination machine failing with only two souls during the entire war. This is that untold story which most of you will discover for the first time.

"In space no one can hear you scream"

Yes, Life is very much a knockoff on the basic premise of 1979's Alien. That's not so much of a problem for me. It's become increasingly true that there are few truly original ideas remaining, at least in Hollywood. And while it's trendy to complain that this is the unique state of affairs of our time, that isn't really true either. Alien itself was pretty much a knockoff of the 1958 classic It The Terror From Beyond Space, where a vicious life-form is a stowaway on a ship sent to rescue the lone survivor of a Martian expedition. In all three films we are treated to a claustrophobic rendition of Agatha Christi's Ten Little Indians as an alien creature picks off the confined astronauts one at a time. No, a film doesn't need to be terribly original in order to be entertaining. And Life certainly has its entertaining moments. More technologically advanced than its predecessors, the film is quite visually stunning. Unfortunately, it devolves pretty much into a slasher film in space. Instead of hapless and stoned teenagers making the kind of stupid mistakes that play into the hands of a maniacal killer, we have men and women who are supposed to represent the best and brightest planet Earth has to offer... making the kind of stupid mistakes that play into the appendages of a maniacal alien creature.

“First, there is an opportunity.  Then…there’s a betrayal.”

It’s been 20 years since the release of Trainspotting, and it’s fair to say a lot has changed in the past two decades.  I remember going out to the United Artists Mission Bell Cinemas to see Trainspotting the weekend it came out.  I was with my best friend at the time, and neither of us was old enough to buy tickets for the film, so we ended up having to sneak into the film.  We’d seen the trailers, and in a time before the internet, there just wasn’t much we could find out about it aside from reading articles in the entertainment magazines.  To this day, I remember walking out of the auditorium simply floored by the film.  Everything from the soundtrack to the visuals just hit me, and this was one of the first times I realized what creative influence a director has on the look and feel of a film.  I came out as a fan of Danny Boyle and the insane kinetic energy he puts into the look of his films.  Over the years Danny Boyle has stepped out of the independent film spotlight and become a big-league director with several other award-inning films i.e.: Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, and Steve Jobs.