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Editor's note: This review is cross-posted at JohnHanlonReviews.com “I can’t fake it,” then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney said as the political advisers and family members nearby deflated. They knew what that meant. The scene, which occurred during the heated 2008 GOP primary battle between Romney and his rising political adversary, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), occurs early on in the new Netflix documentary, Mitt. The film premieres on Netflix at 11 AM today and offers a rarely-seen look at the former Governor and his family as they trudge through two seemingly-endless presidential campaigns. Director Greg Whiteley was given great access to Romney...

What happens when a teenager who came into the world as an unplanned teenage pregnancy ends up with an unplanned pregnancy of her own? Will she bend to all the "helpful" insistence that she needs to exercise her "right to choose" before she is, as one callous presidential contender put it, "punished with a baby"? This is the plot of "Gimme Shelter," a new movie that departs from the feminist pack mentality of Hollywood. Agnes "Apple" Bailey -- played in a breakout role by "High School Musical" star Vanessa Hudgens -- looks like a poster child for Planned Parenthood at...

To the extent that art really does imitate life, every American owes it to themselves and to our troops to see the blockbuster film, Lone Survivor. Panned by cynical elites as "shameless war-porn," in reality this movie portrays the heroism and sacrifice of four members of Seal Team 10 during a mission gone bad in the mountains of Afghanistan in 2007. Operation Redwings was designed to track the location and movements of an Afghani terrorist, Ahmad Shah, with the ultimate goal of taking him out. The mission was compromised when a group of goat herders stumbled across the Americans and...

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A conversation with director Peter Berg, retired Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, and actor Taylor Kitsch of Lone Survivor....

The year is 1961. A wonderful and kind and nice and glorious man named Walt Disney must convince a mean and nasty and crazy woman named P.L. Travers to allow him and his movie studio to do something really nice for his children and your children and everyone’s children. Our hero—call him Walt, everybody does, except P.L. Travers, because she’s mean and nasty and insists on “Mr. Disney”—wants to make a movie out of Travers’s book Mary Poppins, because he promised his kids he would, and a man never backs out on his promise to his kids. P.L. Travers is...

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As the war in Afghanistan winds down, and as the American public is increasingly “war weary” (a phrase I find fascinating since at any given time only 0.6 percent of Americans are in uniform, and the vast majority of Americans have endured not one single second of sacrifice for the war effort since 9/11), anti-military and anti-American sentiment may be rediscovering its Vietnam-era voice. The vehicle for the latest two minutes’ hate is a bit curious, however. Lone Survivor tells the story of a SEAL mission gone wrong and the resulting firefight where a small band of SEALs displayed remarkable...

Movie critics have called “Lone Survivor” the best war-time movie since “Saving Private Ryan.” The film — based on the true story of Navy SEALs on a mission in Afghanistan — caused CNN’s Jake Tapper to question the operation that took the lives of 19 men. The Navy SEALs were tasked to capture or kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah when an unexpected event forced them into a deadly situation.During a tense interview with former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell and Mark Wahlberg, who plays Luttrell in the movie, Tapper questioned if the lives of the 19 men were lost “senselessly.” Luttrell...

Right-wing rocker Ted Nugent has branded movie mogul Harvey Weinstein a "subhuman punk" and compared him to a Nazi over his plans to make a hard-hitting new film with an anti-gun theme. Weinstein has confirmed Meryl Streep is onboard for his new project, reportedly named "The Senator's Wife," which he hopes will tackle the controversial issue of gun control in America.

This thread contains talk about Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit - read at your risk if you don't want any spoiler.

Hello FRiends. So we went to see 12 years a Slave. Wow! I totally recommend it. It was a true story that does not get all Hollywood Liberal. It was basically a true to life synopsis of the time this "free" man becomes a slave. It is astonishingly good. I went because I could not believe it won the Golden Globe for 2014 as the Best Film and I had no idea about the film before that night. My wife is not convinced that it should have been best film, but I am thinking closer to believing it should be....

A new documentary about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney premiered Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. The film, "Mitt," is an extraordinarily intimate look at the former Massachusetts governor as he ran for president twice, in 2008 and 2012. Director Greg Whiteley had impressed Romney with his 2005 documentary "New York Doll," which brilliantly chronicled a broken-down rock musician's conversion to Mormonism, and for the new film, Romney gave Whiteley unprecedented freedom to record behind-the-scenes moments as the candidate and his family endured the trials of two presidential campaigns..... the old lack of confidence came out again...

The biographical film’s wide opening of $38.2 million set the record for highest major debut for any war film since 9/11

Kristen Stewart is hooking up with Jennifer Lawrence's boyfriend on the big screen. The 23-year-old actress has signed on to star opposite Nicholas Hoult in the upcoming futuristic love story Equals. In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Stewart explains why she's nervous to take on the part. "I can't believe I agreed to do it," Stewart told The Associated Press on Monday, Jan. 14. "I'm terrified of it. Though it's a movie with a really basic concept, it's overtly ambitious." "It's a love story of epic, epic, epic proportion," she added. "I'm scared." Equals is an adaptation of...

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Editor's note: This review is cross-posted at JohnHanlonReviews.com Director Peter Berg knows how to celebrate the fraternal affection that men oftentimes share with one another. On the show "Friday Night Lights"—which he executive produced, wrote for and sometimes directed— the male friendships on display were formed on the football field. In Berg’s latest production—the film "Lone Survivor"— those relationships are borne and grown in the military quarters and on the battlefield. Based on the nonfiction book by Marcus Luttrell, this new drama focuses on a team of Navy SEALs—a band of brothers, if you will—who are sent into Afghanistan to...

Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is all about excess. From orgies on a plane to cocaine and cash (or “fun coupons” as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character calls them), the financial drama thrives in taking it up a notch. So it should be no surprise that Paramount’s R-rated film sets the all-time record for the use of the f-word. According to Wikipedia, the word “f***” is used 506 times over “The Wolf of Wall Street’s” 180-minute running time. Previously, the record for a non-documentary was Spike Lee’s 1999 film “Summer of Sam” with 435 instances.

1. American Hustle 2. August: Osage County 3. 12 Years a Slave 4. Gravity 5. Rush 6. Nebraska 7. The Place Beyond the Pines 8. Captain Phillips 9. Monsters University 10. About Time Honorable mentions: 1. 42 2. Her 3. Blue Jasmine 4. Filling the Void 5. Black Nativity 6. The Kings of Summer 7. The Wolf of Wall Street