Just in time for the holidays, Cinema Squabble checks in with episode #24 (download .mp3): The big news this week? Star Wars: The Force Awakens, of course. Squabblers Sara Michelle, Brian and Adam dive right into it in non-spoiler fashion.  Plus, reviews of  The Big Short, Sisters, The Danish Girl, Joy and The Revenant. Also, […]

With “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” opening today I thought it would be fun to revisit a 2011 interview I conducted with one of the film’s biggest new stars, talented newcomer John Boyega. While I don’t intend to run these “Flashback Fridays” on a weekly basis, I do think they’ll be a fun way to look back at the Moviefreak library in ways that are both entertaining and informative. Here’s hoping you all enjoy.

The Danish Girl understands sex and gender are not the same thing, and that the former isn’t a binary construct that only allows for two norms. The options are endless, and the fact the film not only embraces this, but celebrates it, makes it as important a piece of a cinematic entertainment as any to be released this year.

But Pell’s script, inspired in no small way by her own relationship with her own sister, is so smart, so genuine, as crazy as things might get the human saga at the center remains pure and realistically heartfelt no matter what. With Poehler and Fey working at such a high level, and with the laughs being as constant, and as massive, as they prove to be, Sisters is just a joy to behold, watching it a rambunctious riot I almost didn’t want to see come to an end.

What is learned, who is who and what is what, all of it matters, not just so much in regards to the greater picture as far as the new trilogy is concerned but also as it pertains to the narrative here. The filmmakers maintain remarkable focus, a singularity of purpose, doing yeoman’s work fleshing out Rey and Finn while also giving Solo an astonishing arc no fan of the series will ever be able to forget.

Ghost Story is not the novel that inspired it. Large swaths of Peter Straub’s source material are almost unavoidably absent. But looking at it now, almost 35 years after its original release, the movie holds up rather nicely, anchored by a quartet of performance by some talented pros and some unsettling scare sequences ingeniously staged by the director John Irvin that more than impress.

Rebecca Ferguson is a star, plain and simple, and Tom Cruise’s fearlessness is still a sight to behold. But, truth be told? Rogue Nation doesn’t play near as well the second time around as it did the first. Still very entertaining. Still a good time. Just not nearly as rewatchable as the last two Mission: Impossible adventures have proven to be, and I’d be awfully remiss if I didn’t take a second or two to point that out.

Haynes takes these themes and ideas and makes them sing, never losing focus as to who this story belongs to. Carol is a timeless, brilliantly realized drama that ranks up with there with the finest features the director has ever had a hand in crafting, the smile of recognition and understanding that closes things out an unforgettable celebratory stunner that shook me right to my very core.

As Moby Dick stories go, Melville’s book still stands head and shoulders above all the rest, John Huston’s 1956 adaptation with Gregory Peck a fine version of the story as well. In attempting to ground things in historical fidelity, Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea loses the human intimacy that makes this epic what it is, the resulting movie nothing more than an empty voyage to nowhere that sinks far more often than it swims.