Gangster Squad
Film Review by Kam Williams
Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) was born and raised in Brooklyn where he started out as a prizefighter before moving to Chicago during Prohibition to become an enforcer for Al Capone. In the Forties, he was sent by Meyer Lansky to Los Angeles to establish extortion, gambling, prostitution and loan shark operations on behalf of the Jewish Mafia.
Mickey gradually began to make inroads, which didn't sit well with LA Police Chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte) who was determined to prevent any crime syndicate from gaining a foothold in his city. But that would prove easier said than done since the vicious mobster had already succeeded in bribing and/or intimidating many cops, judges and powerful politicians.
Given the frightening degree of corruption, Parker decided that the only way to bring down Mickey was to behave just as ruthlessly. So, he asked one of his most fearless officers, Sergeant John O'Mara (Josh Brolin), to form a top secret team whose mission would be to enforce the law by breaking it.
For, the so-called Gangster Squad's mission was simply to enter each of Cohen's establishments anonymously in order to break kneecaps and generally trash the place. Of course, if any of O'Mara's goons were killed or captured, the Commissioner would have to disavow any knowledge of their actions.
Thus unfolds Gangster Squad, a stylized costume drama with far more charm than one would ordinarily expect to find in an old-fashioned shoot ‘em up. Directed by Ruben Fleisher (Zombieland), the film is based on the clever Paul Lieberman best-seller of the same name.
The production was blessed with an A-list cast which includes Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin, Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick and Mireille Enos. Therefiore, there are no throwaway roles here, with even lesser characters benefitting from development as a consequence of veteran thespians putting their all into their performances.
As a result, you come to care not only about whether or not Mickey will ever be brought to justice, but about surprisingly-engaging subplots involving a lawman (Gosling) going gaga over the gangsta's moll (Stone), and about a pregnant wife's (Enos) worry about whether her gung-ho hubby's (Brolin) will live long enough to witness his baby's birth. Nevertheless, the front story does feature all the staples of the genre, from flashy Zoot suits to Tommy guns to street smart dialogue mixing slang and savoir faire in a manner reminiscent of Damon Runyon.
A high body-count showdown between rogue cops and the Kosher Nostra for the future of Los Angeles!
Excellent (4 stars)
Rated R for profanity and graphic violence
Running time: 113 minutes
Distributor: Warner Brothers
To see a trailer for Gangster Squad, visit
The Impossible
Film Review by Kam Williams
On the day after Christmas in 2004, a magnitude 9.3 earthquake, the third largest ever measured on the Richter scale, triggered a mammoth tsunami in the Indian Ocean which cost a quarter million people their lives. Thanks to the ubiquity of surveillance and cell phone cameras, the world was able to witness much of the tragedy, including tidal waves crashing ashore and creeping deep inland before sweeping humans, cars and everything else in its path back out to sea.
Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry Belon (Ewan McGregor), a married couple from Spain, had the misfortune to be vacationing in Thailand with their three sons (Tom Holland, Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast) that fateful day. Because they had rented a ground level cottage at a luxurious beachfront resort, they were engulfed by water and separated from each other the moment disaster struck.
The family's ensuing ordeal is the subject of The Impossible, a harrowing tale of survival directed by Juan Antonia Bayona (The Orphanage). The Belons' nationality has admittedly been changed from Spanish to British for the sake of the film, but one can only assume that the rest of their terrifying experience has been accurately recreated here.
The film opens with a relatively serene tableau covering their uneventful, Christmas Eve flight to Khao Lak as well as their subsequent celebration of the holiday opening presents and snorkeling. Of course, that deceptively idyllic setup is just the quiet before the storm.
When the tsunami hits the following morning, their hotel is engulfed, and from that point forward the picture is presented primarily from Maria's point of view. We first witness her clinging to a palm tree, and then saving eldest son Lucas (Holland).
The kid eventually escorts his profusely bleeding mother through the chaos to a makeshift hospital for some urgently-needed medical attention. While she teeters between life and death, Lucas perambulates the devastated region for any sign, living or dead, of his missing father and siblings.
Did they make it? Sorry, far be it from this critic to spoil the resolution of any edge-of-your-seat thriller, even if based on actual events.
Forget National Lampoon, this flick chronicles the real vacation from Hell!
Very Good (3 stars)
Rated PG-13 for brief nudity, disturbing images and intense disaster sequences
In English and Thai with subtitles
Running time: 114 minutes
Distributor: Summit Entertainment
To see a trailer for The Impossible, visit
Zero Dark Thirty
Film Review by Kam Williams
After 9/11, the United States intensified its efforts in the international manhunt for Osama bin Laden (Ricky Sekhon). Nevertheless, the elusive mastermind of the terrorist attack continued to orchestrate mass murders in Bali, Istanbul, London, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere around the world.
Dismayed by the ever-mounting death toll, the authorities rationalized the use of rough interrogation tactics bordering on torture in the hope of expediting the capture, dead or alive, of the slippery al-Qaida leader. He was ultimately tracked down to a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan where he died on May 2, 2011 during a daring, helicopter raid conducted by Navy SEAL Team Six,
Directed by two-time, Academy Award-winner Kathryn Bigelow (for The Hurt Locker), Zero Dark Thirty (military speak for 12:30 AM) is a riveting, super-realistic account of the decade-long search for bin Laden. Bigelow has again collaborated with Oscar-winning scriptwriter Mark Boal (also for The Hurt Locker), with the pair apparently gaining access to classified materials in preparing the project.
The film is structured as a tale of female empowerment revolving around Maya (Jessica Chastain), a cool, calm and collected CIA agent who manages to keep her head even when so many around her seem to be losing theirs, literally and/or figuratively. She also has an uncanny knack for deciphering which clues might be worth following, cutting a sharp contrast in this regard to bumbling colleagues who fritter away most of their time on wild goose chases.
At the point of departure, we find Maya finally getting her first taste of fieldwork after starting her career boning-up on bin Laden behind a desk in Washington, D.C. She's been reassigned to participate in the questioning of al-Qaida members and sympathizers being detained at secret sites located outside the U.S. where the Geneva Conventions provisions relating to torture presumably don't apply.
Soon, Maya's chasing clues from Pakistan to Kuwait to Afghanistan and back, alongside tone-deaf bosses (Jason Clarke and Kyle Chandler) who could crack the case quickly if they weren't such male chauvinists suffering from Persistent Disbelief Syndrome. That's the shopworn plot device which pits a frustrated, unappreciated protagonist against an army of stubbornly skeptical naysayers.
Whether a convenient, cinematic contrivance or an accurate portrayal of what transpired, Zero Dark Thirty's version of history certainly makes for a very convincing piece of patriotic storytelling. Credit Jessica Chastain for imbuing her character, Maya, with a compelling combination of vulnerability, sagacity and steely resolve in a memorable, Oscar-quality performance.
CIA Agent Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love waterboarding!
Excellent (4 stars)
Rated R for profanity, disturbing images and graphic violence.
Running time: 157 minutes
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
To see a trailer for Zero Dark Thirty, visit
Promised Land
Film Review by Kam Williams
In 2011, a disturbing documentary called Gasland was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary category. That eye-opening expose' chronicled how energy companies had duped landowners in Pennsylvania and Colorado into signing over the drilling rights on their property while downplaying the ecological risks.
For hydraulic fracturing, AKA fracking, the process employed to mine natural gas, has contaminated many a community's environment, thereby rendering homes virtually uninhabitable. In that movie, victims demonstrated with a match how their tap water had become flammable, and how their pets had inexplicably turned sickly and started shedding fur in patches.
Ostensibly inspired by Gasland, the Biblically-titled Promised Land is a cautionary tale tackling the same theme. This modern morality play reunites director Gus Van Sant with Matt Damon for their fourth collaboration which began back in 1997 with Good Will Hunting. The pair also worked together on Finding Forrester in 2000 and on Gerry a couple of years later.
Here, Damon stars as Steve Butler, a farm boy-turned-itinerant corporate pitchman employed by a gas conglomerate to fast-talk country folks into turning over their drilling rights. He and his partner's (Frances McDormand) latest assignment takes them to McKinley, a cash-strapped, if otherwise idyllic, rural community that stands to be polluted if tricked into signing on the dotted line.
Steve has a down-home way of insinuating himself with the locals which even turns the head of a pretty schoolmarm (Rosemarie DeWitt). Fortunately, a couple of gadflies in the ointment emerge in a skeptical science teacher (Hal Holbrook) and an outside agitator (John Krasinski) who urge everybody not to be blinded by dollar signs, but to do a little research into the potential fallout from fracking.
A transparent message movie which might deserve to be forgiven for moralizing and politicizing, given the urgency of the underlying environmental issue.
Very Good (3 Stars)
Rated R for profanity.
Running time: 106 minutes
Distributor: Focus Features
To see a trailer for Promised Land, visit
Django Unchained
Film Review by Kam Williams
There's a sensible reason why nobody ever wanted to be an Indian whenever we played Cowboys and Indians as kids. That's because the white man was invariably the hero of the Westerns on which we'd been weaned, while the red man had always been presented as a wild savage dismissed by the dehumanizing affirmation that, "The only good Injun is a dead Injun."
Sure, a few films, such as Apaches (1973), The Sons of Great Bear (1966) and Chingachgook: The Great Snake (1967), flipped the script by portraying Native Americans as the good guys and the European settlers as the bad guys. But those productions were few and far between.
Hollywood has also promoted a set of stereotypes when it comes to the depictions of black-white race relations during slavery, with classics like The Birth of the Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) setting the tone. Consequently, most movies have by-and-large suggested that it was a benign institution under which docile African-Americans were well-treated by kindly masters, at least as long as they remained submissive and knew their place.
Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to put a fresh spin on the genre, much as he did in the World War II flick Inglourious Basterds (2009). With Django Unchained, the iconoclast writer/director again rattles the cinematic cage by virtue of an irreverent adventure that audaciously turns the conventional thinking on its head.
Set in the South in 1858, the picture is visually reminiscent of the Spaghetti Westerns popularized in the Sixties by Italian director Sergio Leone, being replete with both big sky panoramas and cartoonish, one-note villains who are the embodiment of evil. But instead of cattle rustlers, it's inveterate racists being slowly tortured or blown away to the delight of the audience.
The movie stars Jamie Foxx in the title role as a slave lucky enough to be liberated by a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz). Abolitionist Dr. Schultz altruistically takes Django on as an apprentice, and proceeds to teach him how to ride a horse and handle a gun.
The grisly business of tracking down outlaws "Wanted Dead-or-Alive" conveniently affords the revenge-minded freedman many an opportunity to even the score with folks responsible for his misery, from the scars on his back, to the "R" for "Runaway" branded on his cheek, to being separated from his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). As you might guess, the action gets pretty gruesome, as is par for the course for any Tarantino vehicle.
Slavery reimagined as a messy splatterfest where massa gets exactly what he deserves, and then some!
Excellent (4 stars)
Rated R for profanity, nudity, ethnic slurs and graphic violence
Running time: 165 minutes
Distributor: The Weinstein Company
To see a trailer for Django Unchained, visit