Lincoln (2012)

Lincoln (2012)

[7] Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood) won his third Oscar for his convincing portrait of America's 16th president during the final months of the Civil War. Lincoln is a decades-long pet project for director Steven Spielberg,…
Everest (2015)

Everest (2015)

[6] Everest is the true story of a deadly 1996 expedition up Mount Everest in which two climbing parties suffered casualties after a fierce blizzard engulfed the mountain with little warning. The film is more of a dramatic biopic than…
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

[8] Seven months after the rape and murder of her daughter, a grieving mother challenges her local police department to find the culprit when she advertises on three incendiary billboards. Frances McDormand (Fargo) headlines Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which is…
American Gangster (2007)

American Gangster (2007)

[6] Ridley Scott directs from a script by Steven Zaillian this true story about a New York detective (Russell Crowe) and a drug lord (Denzel Washington) whose paths cross in the 1970s to expose deep-rooted corruption in the police force.…
Winter’s Bone (2010)

Winter’s Bone (2010)

[8] Jennifer Lawrence earned her first Oscar nomination playing Ree, a brave teenager raising her younger siblings in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell. When her drug-dealing father puts the family home up for collateral on…
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

[7]

Writer/director Miranda July also stars in this Cannes and Sundance Film Festival winner about people trying to connect with each other in an age when culture and technology make that connection more challenging. The film seems to be saying that we are all experiencing this difficulty, but July’s characters are so quirky and awkward that Me and You and Everyone We Know is as much an absurdist fairy tale as it is social commentary. Either way, it’s an interesting film full of bizarre relationships mined for greater truth than for exploitation. Take a six-year old boy’s on-line relationship with a mysterious woman who agrees to “poop back and forth” into each other forever. Or a grown man’s sexually explicit window signage for two teenaged girls that pass by his apartment every day. July doesn’t play these up for laughs, but instead takes them to realistic and surprising conclusions. When the teenaged girls become curious and knock on the man’s door, he hides in fear. And when the boy agrees to meet his sexting partner, the potential nightmare is revealed to be something sweet and tender.