Category Archives: Film Review

Film Review: The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 25, 2015

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In 1974, former Catholic seminary student Christopher Boyce (played by Timothy Hutton) takes a job at TRW, a Southern California aerospace firm, where he is read on to highly classified programs related to the then-new technology of satellites. Through a childhood friend, drug dealer, and minor smuggler, Andrew Daulton Lee (played by Sean Penn), Boyce begins selling secrets to Soviet intelligence based in the Embassy in Mexico.

Credit should be given for the graphics. While released in the mid-1980s, the clothing (and hair) is clearly of 1970s vintage. But the film’s narrative is direly flawed—both in what it does say and what it doesn’t.
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Film Review: Citizenfour (2014) by Laura Poitras

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on February 6, 2015

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Produced and directed by Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based, American-born producer and director, who has made numerous films attacking America’s foreign policy, Citizenfour rounds out a trilogy that started in 2006 with My Country, My Country about the U.S. regency in Iraq, and had its last instalment in 2010 with The Oath, a film that apparently follows two al-Qaeda members in Yemen and concludes they’re not such bad chaps.

The target this time for Poitras is the National Security Agency (NSA). Continue reading →

Film Review: JFK (1991)

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 23, 2015

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It was shockingly bad. One had known the contours of the story going in, but even bracing oneself for a Grassy Knoll enterprise will not prepare one for how sheerly dull and ludicrous is this film. Add to that the two-hundred minutes running time, and it is unbearable. Continue reading →

Film Review: The Paedophile Hunter (2014) by Stinson Hunter

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 3, 2014

“The Paedophile Hunter,” which aired on Wednesday (October 1), is still trending on Twitter. The heart of the program is the moral dilemma over vigilantism—think Dexter, but in this case the crime it is the foulest of all: child rape.

Having pre-judged it by the response on social media, I have to concede that the methods of the “hunters” are fairer than I had imagined. Continue reading →

Film Review: The Islamic State (2014) by Vice News

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 25, 2014

Abu Mosa, the Islamic State's press officer

Abu Mosa, the Islamic State’s press officer

This is an extraordinary piece of work from Vice News. Earlier this month they released a five-part film after one of their journalists, Medyan Dairieh, embedded with the Islamic State (I.S.), formerly ISIS, in Raqqa City, the de facto headquarters of I.S. in north-eastern Syrian. It’s an extraordinarily brave thing to do given the number of journalists I.S. has kidnapped, the number of journalists killed in Syria (at least sixty), and of course the penchant of the Zarqawi’ites for beheading Westerners on video, as gruesomely underlined again with the murder of James Foley. Continue reading →

Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 9, 2014

Released on December 21, 2007, twenty-eight years to the month after the Soviet Union launched Operation STORM 333, decapitating the Afghan government and plunging the country into a decade-long war, Charlie Wilson’s War tells a story centred on Representative Charles Wilson of Texas (Tom Hanks), a conservative Democrat, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a Right-wing Christian socialite in Houston who has taken the Afghans to her bosom because of her hatred for communism, and Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a blue-collar case officer at the CIA who is the epitome of the adage that one can get anything done in Washington so long as one does not care who gets the credit. Between them they cajole Congress into moving its appropriations from $5 million to $500 million, which will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Saudis, to help the Afghan resistance combat the Red Army’s occupation of their country. Continue reading →

Film Review: This Is What Winning Looks Like (2013) by Ben Anderson

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 22, 2014

Journalist Ben Anderson

Ben Anderson did his filming between 2007 and the present in Afghanistan. He presents a picture of a country in free-fall, of a West in denial, and of a war that the Allies have given up on. Continue reading →

Film Review: My Brother The Islamist (2011)

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 21, 2014

Rich Leech

Rich Leech

Following Robb Leech, whose step-brother, Rich, has been converted to Islam, the film shows the path of the “white,” middle-class (in the British sense), apparently-irreligious Westerner who succumbs to the call of faith. T Continue reading →