HOT TOPIC: MEN WRITE 70 PERCENT OF REVIEWS PUBLISHED IN AMERICA'S TOP 100 DAILIES... Shocked? Read more
FEATURED: "Frozen River" (star Melissa Leo and director Courtney Hunt on set, pictured above)
Jenny Halper is the film editor of Spare Change News, a Cambridge bi-monthly dedicated to empowering the homeless. She's written for the Boston Phoenix, Boston Now, NewEnglandFilm.com, amNewYork, Beliefnet, Cinema Confidential, Park Slope Reader, and Knit Simple Magazine, among others, and has served as a film critic/entertainment reporter for Track Entertainment and ClickFlicks.net. Her fiction has appeared in journals including Smokelong Quarterly and New England Fiction Meeting House, and has been a finalist for prizes from Glimmer Train and the Sonora Review. A graduate of Northwestern University, she'is currently earning an MFA at Emerson College.
Under the banner of “community outreach,” Boston-based AWFJ member Jenny Halper screened “Frozen River” for her students at Emerson College’s Young Writers Program, then assigned them to review the film. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s rare to see a film that sets up a world both extremely recognizable and rarely seen, and rarer still when it turns out to ask moral questions without preaching. In her debut feature Frozen River, Courtney Hunt creates a story that serves simultaneously as a thriller and an insightful examination of the line between morality and necessity Read the rest of this entry »
On screen she’s a chameleon; in person the actress is disarmingly down-to-earth and smart enough to intimidate you even though that’s clearly not what she’s trying to do. Read more
Inspired by Peter Landesman’s NY Times article, “The Girls Next Door,” “Trade” exposes traffickers who lure young, naďve girls to Mexico for supposedly legit jobs, only to drug and smuggle them into the US, where they are crammed into basement brothels and kept as sex slaves. Read the rest of this entry »
Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book, which began as an article for Outside magazine, uses flashbacks, voiceover, and chapters – pretty much every unconventional trick of the screenwriting trade – to tell the story in a stirring way. It works. Read the rest of this entry »
“Gracie,” starring and produced by Elisabeth Shue, is inspired both by the death of her older brother and by her tireless dedication to sports, soccer in particular. Read the rest of this entry »
When Vera Farmiga was preparing to play an underemployed drug addict, shivering in a rehab center and working the grocery checkout line in upstate New York, she probably didn’t know she was making the movie that would ultimately land her a plum role in “The Departed.” Read the rest of this entry »