TIFF16 REVIEW: טהורה לעד [Tehora la’ad] [Forever Pure] [2016]

“My heart will always stay yellow and black” Just when you think it can’t get worse—that the vocal, racist minority spewing bile will be extinguished in a show of tide-turning empathy—everything is literally engulfed in flames as a city watches it burn to cheers from a cesspool of hate. This is the 2012-2013 season for Beitar Jerusalem FC in the Israeli Premier League. A soccer team beloved by enough fans to make them a political target for President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the reason their owner at…

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TIFF16 REVIEW: Bleed for This [2016]

“Christ and elephants” There’s something about boxing movies that gets butts in seats regardless of so many being practically the same story. The formula almost always concerns some type of personal and professional redemption and Ben Younger‘s Bleed for This is no exception. Being a true telling of Vinny Pazienza’s (Miles Teller) arduous journey back into the ring after a near-fatal car crash severed his neck, however, means it possesses some substance beyond the old “washed up” bid for revenge against the press or a former coach/manager who’s now inexplicably…

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REVIEW: Inspired [2015]

“Don’t be late” For a student film, Maggie Kaszuba‘s Inspired is an effective cinematic effort. Depicting the life of a teenage girl dealing with ambivalence at home and tough love at school, the short has a wealth of earned emotion once relationships flesh out and motivation is revealed. Samantha Higgins (Tyler Kipp) is an underachiever not by choice, but circumstance. She’s depressed, sleepwalking through a tired existence that Coach Stafford (Ariane M. Reinhart) makes worse via a refusal to listen to the real causes of her basketball player’s struggles. Only…

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REVIEW: The Trials of Muhammad Ali [2013]

“A white man’s heaven is a black man’s hell” While the structure of Bill Siegel‘s The Trials of Muhammad Ali delivers nothing new to the language of documentary—archival footage mixed with present-day interviews working towards a specific thesis—the story at it’s back is too interesting to blindly dismiss. We all know Ali as a poet, the champion lording over Sonny Liston, and a member of the Nation of Islam. We know him as a conscientious dissenter who never ended up in jail, but do we know the details surrounding this…

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REVIEW: The Phenom [2016]

“You give it a name and it might want to stick around” I admittedly didn’t think too much on The Phenom after watching its trailer. There was a good cast, its look behind the curtain of fame seemed intriguing, and there’d probably be some darkly honest depictions of sports abuse at the hands of over-zealous parents. But then I saw who the writer/director was and suddenly all I could do was think. Noah Buschel is the man behind a wonderful little character piece from a few years back called Sparrows…

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REVIEW: Pelé: Birth of a Legend [2016]

“When in doubt: do what they do” It may be called Pelé: Birth of a Legend, but Jeff and Michael Zimbalist‘s film is really about Ginga soccer and Brazil at risk of losing its soul. The climax depicts the 1958 World Cup with the country’s unexpected run to the final on the back of a seventeen year-old hobbled by a sprained knee, but it’s not his goal scoring that inspires confidence. His ability to run around the pitch in complete ignorance of the Europeans’ formation game lights a fire that…

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REVIEW: Eddie the Eagle [2016]

“Come on, man. Be a wing of a bird.” I was a freshman in high school when we traveled to Lake Placid as part of an Earth Science field trip. One of our main stops was the old 1980 Olympic compound, the most exciting bit of which was the ski jump towers to get a sense of the height involved. What I remember most about the tour guide’s history lesson was his mention of it being the site where Britain’s Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards practiced before his bid at the…

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REVIEW: Concussion [2015]

“Tell the truth” As of September of 2015 it was reported that 87 former NFL players tested positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) out of the 91 deceased men researchers at Boston University autopsied. That’s almost 96%. Their study revealed that 79% of all players (professionally, semi-professionally, or college/high school athletes) examined had it—damning numbers not to be ignored and yet the NFL did for many, many years. How long and what exact details they denied, we may never know. Settlements are funny that way. It’s hardly surprising, with the…

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REVIEW: Point Break [2015]

“Do you own a suit, son?” We’ve officially come full circle. Point Break arrived in 1991 with more cheese than a Green Bay Packers game and ten years later a fresh generation got to enjoy an ambiguous cops and robbers romp that moved the same basic plot from ocean to streets with The Fast and the Furious. It’s probably an obscure connection at best, but the cinematographer of than unofficial remake, Ericson Core, just happens to now be the man to bring a brand new version of the original story…

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REVIEW: Creed [2015]

“Now that we’re family, who won that third fight?” The question on everyone’s mind gets answered immediately in Ryan Coogler‘s Creed: How can Michael B. Jordan be Apollo Creed’s son if he was already born throughout Carl Weather‘s run of four Rocky films? Well, Adonis Johnson (Jordan) isn’t that boy. Instead he’s a child out of wedlock whose mother was pregnant at the time of the boxer’s death. Sadly she also passed away leaving young Adonis in and out of foster homes and juvenile detention centers until Mary Anne Creed…

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TIFF15 REVIEW: The Program [2015]

“I’m flying” When you think about what Lance Armstrong did to the sport of cycling—winning seven straight Tour de France titles before finally being revealed as a cheater—you have to laugh. It’s funny how much stock people around the world put in professional sports and athletes only to see their fallibilities as a betrayal. Celebrities in other vocations screw up all the time; some have found their fame specifically for screwing up. But there is integrity to athletics that must not be tainted in the public consciousness. Somehow sports aren’t…

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