Ethical Reviews

BY MZ. MANNERS, VIGILANTE GUERILLA

If you're in trouble and no one else can help, you might as well contact us here at a2ethics.org. The A-Team returns to the cultural slopbucket, part of a delicious trough of strange summer entertainment. A group of veterans who are part of an elite unit go underground, become a mean, clever band of vigilante pranksters, and solve the major problems in society. The A-Team, ethically speaking, is problematic.

By BARCODE 2x

The new Robin Hood is released this weekend, and he takes on a broader political agenda that will satisfy a very divided audience base. In Ridley Scott's new telling of the old British vigilante's beginnings, Robin Hood is less interested in robbing the rich and giving to the poor than he is in alleviating tax burdens. Is this the changing face of vigilantism?

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.