Film Review on Good Will Hunting

Reading is close to poetry. And the results are so convincing that they make you forget to accept that the characters are practicing. It’s the kind of movie that emotionally hits so close to home at any level that you no longer looks like you’re just watching a film, you feel like you’re right there with those characters in the same place, feeling the same conditions that they are.

In Good Will Hunting, Will (Matt Damon), who grew up in rough South Boston as an abusive foster boy, works at MIT as a janitor. A professor looks for him as he solves complex math problems that have stumped the students, only to discover that he is in prison for assaulting a policeman. The professor promises he will work with Will to get psychiatric support from him.

The professor tries out his distant college friend, Sean (Robin Williams), while Will manages to scare off a series of therapists. Sean, like Will, is the victim of a rough Southie childhood, still dealing with his own loss, which means Sean is able to make Will know that by using his gifts to enlarge his world, he is not betraying his mates.

Will fell in love with pre-med Harvard student Skylar (Minnie Driver) along the way. She and Sean teach him that he no longer wants the barriers he created to shield himself from suffering and that they are only getting in his way.

Movie Review: Taxi to the Dark Side

Taxi to the dark side is a movie by Alex Gibney in which he seems to want to present a rare insight into the lawlessness that prevailed during the Bush administration (Plonsky, Begg and Brand). Alex Gibney attempts to present the viewer with a picture of how war time conditions in Afghanistan gave birth to some of the most horrifying heights of cruelty and brutality. Alex Gibney shows the viewers a story of an Afghan taxi driver whose name is Dilawar. Alex Gibney shows how Dilawar was brutally beaten up by American soldiers at the Bagram Air Base and how they treated him with such a degree of mercilessness that he died out of injuries inflicted from the beating.

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Movie Review: Woyzeck

Woyzeck is a tragedy that centers on the extreme depths of poverty and the implications of poverty that prevail in society. Directed, produced and written by Werner Herzog, Woyzeck is a tragedy that is one of the rare few that does not seem to be meant to have a happy ending but to instigate a storm of thought and pondering in the audience (Kinski, Mattes and Reichmann). The audience feels frustrated and there is a lingering sense of incompletion because of the fact that the few elements that had honest desires in heart suffered the most.

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Movie Review: Caramel

Over time, Arab cinema has come to a point where it has learnt countless lessons from western cinemas and has successfully elaborated extensively upon the most sensitive of issues of society. Movies such as these include the 2008 All My Life by Maher Sabry which explores the life of a gay man in Egypt (Sabry, 2008), the 2006 Bahraini Tale by Bassam Al Thawadi which explores the life of a middle class family that is stranded in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War (Thawadi, 2006) and the 2007 Caramel by Nadine Labaki which elaborates upon the lives of five different women whose lives are riddled with the most complex of circumstances.

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