Ethical Reviews

By BARCODE 2x

Shutter Island's Leonardo DiCaprio suffers from headaches, nightmares, tremors, and a deep sense of paranoia. He hallucinates, becomes delusional, and does his level best during his psychological unraveling to uncover what may be a government plot. Like the Nazis, doctors at this film's dreary, ominous prison may be engaging in deadly experiments upon unwitting mental patients. DiCaprio's protagonist is a war veteran suffering a trauma that drives him to madness,  but are these horrors all real or imagined?

By BARCODE 2x

By BARCODE 2X

Cue the inspiring African choir music! Start the slow clap! Hook up a TV so the whole shantytown can watch: the ultra-political games have begun! Clint Eastwood has been putting out a film about every six weeks or so lately, and here comes his most problematic film to date! Better wear a cup, Clint! A2ethics is coming on the field!

By BARCODE 2x

He's a complicated man. No one understands him but his woman. And a2ethics.org!

Gordon Parks' seminal 1971 film Shaft begins with views of a sleazy, seedy Broadway. Movie marquees display dirty porn titles, but also films starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Redford. The marquees soon seem dimmed and the focus turns to the era's new kind of movie star. Richard Roundtree as Detective Shaft comes up out of the subway, walks out through traffic, cuts across town, and something new was born. Film was changed forever.

By BARCODE 2x

An Education, starring Peter Sarsgaard and Carey Mulligan, is a beautiful and eloquent film about a very tough subject. Jenny (Mulligan) is 16 when she meets the charming older David (Sarsgaard). He offers her a lift in the rain, and thus begins a tender, romantic, and troubling turn of events.

By BARCODE 2x

Stephen King's hefty new novel Under the Dome imagines an ordinary autumn day in a small New England town, suddenly stricken with death and unspeakable terror. An invisible dome descends over the town of Chester's Mill, Maine, and no one is getting in or out.

By BARCODE 2x

So-called family movies in recent memory have a soul-searching, existensial bent to them. WALL-E and Where the Wild Things Are demand a bit of self-examination from the viewer. We get a whole lot more out of these films than we expect. I'm not sure it's always good for children to be confronted with ideas of death, disaster, and an uncertain future. It may not be good for adults, either.

BARCODE 2x

The Baader-Meinhof Complex takes us inside a popular terrorist group that emerged in the 1960s and 70s in Germany. The children of the Nazi era had come of age, and their anger over the war in Vietnam, the police brutality against peaceful protesters, and corporate media distortion led them to extreme violence.