Author Archive: Adam Mohrbacher
Adam Mohrbacher is a freelance film critic who has been published online with filmophilia.com, examiner.com and of course Film Monthly. He loves the work of Ryan Gosling, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman and the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The FilmCraft Series: Directing
The newest addition to the FilmCraft series library focuses squarely on what is perhaps the most challenging of cinematic roles: the director. However, despite the complexity of its subject matter, the esteemed Mike Goodridge is able to provide an indelible portrait of the nature of the profession through a diverse array of interviews and profiles of [...]
The Presidents
Did you know that President Jimmy Carter collects arrow-heads? Were you aware that President Clinton vainly tried to resolve the 1994 Major League Baseball strike? Can you believe that George Washington was his own bookkeeper, and that his ledgers still survive today? These are some of the facts that The Presidents (available now on BluRay [...]
The Woman
The 2011 film, The Woman (written and directed by Lucky McKee and now available on DVD and BluRay) bares a title that is little more than an unassuming facade -one that is entirely unrevealing of the perverse and occasionally bloodthirsty content that lies within. So, what is the film about? Well, essentially the film’s focus [...]
Best Films of 2011
1. The Tree of Life Terrence Malick’s metaphysical and seemingly autobiographical cosmology, which juxtaposes the origins of the universe with the physical and emotional development of a young boy growing up in a small Texas community, stands as the greatest cinematic achievement of the year –towering over all other films with its thematic complexity and [...]
Machine Gun Preacher
In liberal-minded Hollywood, the African continent seems to represent a prime opportunity. Over the years this has proven to be excellent fodder for a variety of directors, from Ed Zwick to Robert Redford, to present lavish and scenic romances or sanctimonious social statements on the region’s seemingly eternal geo-political and ethnic conflicts. The new film [...]
Roll Out, Cowboy
In seeking to balance one’s life between the cultivation of creativity and the obligatory pursuit of capital, it is no wonder that artists find themselves perpetually struggling to imbue their lives with some sort of tangible sense of stability. Such is the case for the main subject of the new documentary Roll Out, Cowboy, which [...]
Four Weddings and a Funeral
A young Hugh Grant, periodically sporting a pair of round-rimmed glasses and looking curiously similar to a certain bespectacled young wizard, is the focal point of director’s Mike Newell’s (the man behind Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Prince of Persia) endearing yet forgettable 1994 feature, Four Weddings and a Funeral. The film [...]
The Usual Suspects
In the mid-90‘s, before Hugh Jackman grew out the mutton chops, and long before Superman would return to an apathetic public, an outrageously young director named Bryan Singer would craft a small twisty film called “The Usual Suspects.” Not only did “Suspects” become critically and commercially successful (allowing Singer to unleash the first of what [...]
Hesher
With his shock of grease-ball hair and ostentatiously tattooed body the always malleable actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, deserves some serious props for creating a vivid character with a brutal resonance. Free from the stagnancy and stoicism that defined his Arthur in Chris Nolan’s monolithic Inception, Gordon-Levitt’s title role in Hesher allows the actor to go back [...]
The Human Resources Manager
Road movies are a tricky business. There are few things in life that are quite as invigorating as uprooting yourself from the common and banal circumstances of “everyday” life, making a trek out to unexplored territory, and, if you’re lucky, perhaps learning a thing or two about yourself in the process. Unfortunately, the process of [...]
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