A.A. Dowd

1 month ago | digitaltrends.com | A.A. Dowd |Andrew A. Dowd

Last Breath review: Apollo 13 goes under the sea “It’s fairly gripping from moment to moment, but also hemmed in by its own sense of historical integrity” Pros Grippingly suspenseful at times Admirably focused on the nitty gritty of its true story Cons A little dramatically skimpy at 93 minutes The characterizations are corny “It’s like going into space, but underwater,” saturation diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) says of his uncommon vocation, fixing manmade machinery at depths to which man...

1 month ago | metacritic.com | Francis Ford Coppola |Budd Wilkins |A.A. Dowd

Unfortunately, it appears with every passing day that the great American paranoid political thrillers of the 60's and 70's, with its strongest work bookended by 'The Manchurian Candidate' (eerily foreseeing the JFK assassination) and 'All the President's Men' (placing a coda of closure on the Watergate scandal), simply haven't aged a day, and are as timely as ever in conceptualizing the palpable fear that ordinary citizens have in those in control of their destinies, namely the police and...

1 month ago | digitaltrends.com | A.A. Dowd |Andrew A. Dowd

Table of Contents Film critics make for notoriously spotty Oscar soothsayers. We sometimes prognosticate with our hearts instead of our heads. We’re often too close to a year in movies to guess what a bunch of industry professionals might decide are its highlights. That said, almost nobody is all that good at predicting the Oscars, even people whose job it is to predict the Oscars.

2 months ago | digitaltrends.com | A.A. Dowd |Andrew A. Dowd

It was the hashtag read round the world. “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” quipped lawyer and activist April Reign on January 15, 2015. She was tweeting about that morning’s Academy Award nominations — more specifically, about the fact that every one of the 20 actors recognized across four categories was white. Reign’s criticism would catch on quick, those three words spreading like wildfire across social media.