The Ride of Your Life

"Boyhood"    ★★★ 1/2

A Review by Kevin Powers

When I was a young boy, my mother, a single mother, took my sister and I to King’s Island, just outside Cincinnati.

At King’s Island, there is an old rickety wooden coaster called “The Beast.”

            

“The Beast” is still to this day the longest, most unexpected wooden coaster in the world. It has more ups and downs and lefts and rights than any other coaster I’ve been on. It is exciting, fun, sometimes painful, ever enlightening.

A lot like adolescence.

           

Richard Linklater (“Dazed and Confused”, “School of Rock”) has spent the last 12 years working on one movie. A movie called “Boyhood.” A “Beast” of a movie about a boy growing from boy to man.

O Captain, My Captain!

Robin Williams: In Memoriam

by Kevin Powers

Monday evening started out as any other Monday evening for a teacher newly back to school.

My wife, Amanda, and I decided we would get Mexican for dinner and found ourselves at Clinton, Tennessee's own, Los Caballeros (always good).

Toward the end of the meal, Amanda got an alert on her phone.

“Oh no,” she said.

“What is it?” I replied.

“Robin Williams died."

Coming This Fall: Part I

by Kevin Powers

So begins the school year, football season, cooler weather, falling leaves, and the best movies of the year.

Yes. That’s right. The best movies are always released in the fall. Why? Oscar-bait.

It’s hard to say what exactly will be in the Academy Award discussion at this point. That will come after the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, which are the starting points for the big fall and winter releases sure to win Oscars come late February.

More to come on that in a later column.

For now, I would like to start my Most Anticipated Movies of 2014 list. Here are the first five:  

Missed Masterpieces: Blue is the Warmest Color

Infinite Tenderness

An Essay in Words and Images 

by Kevin Powers

Few movies capture what it is to be an everyday human-being like Abdellatif Kechiche's 2013 masterpiece, "Blue is the Warmest Color."