Amazing Grace (2006)

William Wilberforce, member of the British Parliament, has been unsuccessfully opposing the slave trade for 15 years. The interest to the economy is too great for Parliament to relent, but morality and Wilberforce's health demand he continue to expose the horrors and inhumanity of the trade to criticism and scrutiny. But his health and faith are failing, and in the tide of the American and French Revolutions any criticism of British policy is sedition. Will stubborn minds or his own health break first?

Obviously he gets the bill passed. Otherwise, what a lousy movie it would be! But it is a beautiful story of a pivotal moment in history. It is much like the movies Luther and Hero in that respect, a fantastic story from the past brilliantly portrayed on screen. It is, frankly, my favorite genre of film.

"The Terminal" (2004)

Victor Navorski, a tourist from the imaginary eastern European nation of Krakozia, has a problem. While he was in flight from Krakozia to New York City, there was a military coup in his homeland. All Krakozian travel rights have been suspended, so he cannot go back. And the USA has not yet recognized this new government, so he cannot come into US soil. Thus, he has fallen into a small crack in the system. Legally, he can only remain in the international terminal until something changes. He can only wait.

He remains in this state of limbo for approximately 10 months. 10 months in an airport. Yet he manages to learn some English, make friends with the employees, find love, and discover what is great about America, all without leaving the terminal. Life, as the tagline says, is waiting.

This story lands somewhere between a romantic comedy and a biographical drama. It is (very) loosely based on the plight of a man who was actually stuck in a Parisian airport for two months. A similar story in Canada ended tragically a few years after this movie was made. (That's right, this didn't happen in the USA. Please ignore the subtle, politically biased hints at the start of the movie that all immigration woes are the fault of the Department of Homeland Security, as reality does not reflect any such thing.) It is sweet and heartwarming for the most part, with occasional sharp corners of hard reality pointing through. Tom Hanks plays Victor majestically, even learning to speak Bulgarian (not Russian) for the part. The faults of Cathrine Zeta-Jones' character are faults of morality only; she plays the flawed character brilliantly.

All taken together, this is a beautiful, heart-warming movie of the American dream as experienced by a visitor. The characters are human but heroic, the set is immense, the plot flows nicely and avoids formula or cliche. I wholeheartedly recommend this movie to everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

"Luther" (2003)

In the 1500s lived a German monk named Martin Luther. He, one man alone, took a stable and united Europe and shattered it. By his own admission, tens of thousands died as a result of the revolution he began, the face of western Religion, economics, politics, and culture were forever shifted. For these reasons, every American, every German, every Canadian, Mexican, Latino, European, Christian, everyone should be eternally thankful.

A dramatized biography of a monumentally revolutionary man, this movie is awe-inspiring. Justice and mercy, tradition and revolution, religion and reason, politics and plain truth all shattered and melted together. Everything that's happened in the Western world in 500 years was influenced by this one man.

Given this glowing review of Luther, both the man and the movie, I should make it clear that I am not Lutheran. I don't consider him infallible (far from it, actually), I just recognize a revolutionary, a pivotal identity in history, and respect him accordingly. If you are so supremely anti-Christian as to be unwilling to watch this movie, you can find movies about Ghandi, Emperor Qin, or Buddha. But, without an outline of knowledge of the influence of Martin Luther you remain intellectually crippled, unable to understand why and what Western Culture is.

"Dragonfly" (2002)

When atheist and emergency room doctor Joe Darrow loses his beloved wife, he is devastated that she is gone forever. But then, slowly, he starts seeing things, witnessing things, that insinuate that she's still around and trying to communicate. Is he going mad, or is his wife trying to speak to him from beyond the grave? If the latter, what is she trying to say?

This is a cool movie, romantically portrayed and intelligently written. It studies the gray shades between the white and black of life and death, it considers the idea of an afterlife analytically, and it does my favorite thing a movie can do: show the gray shades between sanity and madness. Aside from these rather commonly good traits, it was brilliant at two points. First, the conclusion fit together and made sense. There was a message worth declaring from beyond the grave, and it was effectively (though not efficiently) delivered. So many paranormal movies end with a special effects sequence or with anti-climatic answers. In this movie, the answers fit. Second, it is a study of the idea of the afterlife with an entirely religiously-neutral point of view. It's not considered a binary choice between Christianity and Atheism, but a complex question with a vast array of possible answers.

I respect and enjoyed this movie. It was dramatic, analytically paranormal, and worth seeing.

"Fly Away Home" (1996)

Amy's parents split up a decade ago and she followed her mother halfway around the world to New Zealand. Now her mother has died in a car accident and she's staying with a half-crazy inventor father she barely remembers in southern Ontario. She has no reason to get up in the morning until she finds and rescues a nest of goose eggs. Now that they've hatched, she's mother to 16 feathered, honking babies. But geese learn to migrate from their parents, and these geese have none. How can a fourteen-year-old girl fly 500 miles?

This is a flat-out fantastic movie. The characters are a blast, alternatively fun and profound. They interact believably with each other and with the overall plot. There's a little family-movie cheese in the recipe, but it blends well with the unique and bizarre parts to feel mature and smart all around. Besides, it's a young Rogue from X-Men playing Amy, and the teaching-geese-to-migrate plot is based on an actual scientific experiment. What isn't cool about that?

"Sneakers" (1992)

In 1969, Martin Brice (Robert Redford) and his buddy Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) were cracking into Richard Nixon's personal checking account and donating his money to left-wing causes. Cosmo tricks Martin into braving the icy weather to get some pizza, but the police show up and arrest Cosmo. Martin escapes and spends the next 20 years hiding his identity and assembling a crack team of crackers-for-hire, running security tests on banks by breaking into them and such. But now the NSA has discovered his identity and is requiring him to pull a heist for them -- find Professor Janik's little black box, an electronic device that can crack computer encryption in seconds instead of decades. Anybody wanna black out New England? Crash a few passenger jets? There isn't a government in the world that wouldn't kill them all for that thing. And, as it turns out, the guys that hired them are a front for the mob. Too many secrets.

Sneakers is a terrific heist film from 1992. It has perhaps the most polished writing in any movie, terrific tension, a great sense of humor, an all-star cast (I especially love Dan Aykroyd as the paranoid conspiracy buff "Mother"), and a sense of same-as-life-size realism (rather than larger-than-life) that is sorely missing in more modern movies. And it does it all within the confines of a well-deserved, family-friendly PG-13 rating. It is an absolute joy, a treat for the geek, spy, wonk, or sneak-thief in all of us.