Jordan M. Smith

"You may be old enough to remember the televised match with Spassky, an avid chess enthusiast yourself, or just a fascinated onlooker of the train wreck that Fischer became, but one and all will surely find it hard to turn away from this stirring biographic doc."

"You may be old enough to remember the televised match with Spassky, an avid chess enthusiast yourself, or just a fascinated onlooker of the train wreck that Fischer became, but one and all will surely find it hard to turn away from this stirring biographic doc."

What is there to say about this masterpiece that hasn't already been said? Somehow tackling cosmic creation and the fruition of a Texas bound family during the 50s, Terrance Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki have crafted one of the most eye poppingly gorgeous films to ever hit celluloid. And it's not just the visual beauty that makes this behemoth a thing of cinematic magic.

It's hard to believe that the predicted apocalypse is nearly upon us. Looking back though, it wouldn't be a bad note to go out on, with so many quality films making their way to theaters around the globe this year. Not surprisingly, several titles tackled the topic of the end of the world (most notably the beautifully bleak Melancholia and the horrifically realistic Contagion), while others looked at the grim realities of life and decided that a brighter future is just around the bend (the youthful confusion of In A Better World and the depressingly sensual Burning Man).

"Mateo Gil and screenwriter Miguel Barros want you to forget all about that image, re-imagining the event with Cassidy surviving, reinventing himself down the road as James Blackthorne. It's been marketed almost like a sequel that could never live up to its predecessor, but taken as a sovereign entity, Blackthorn is a beautiful new take on the legendary bandit that disregards the past and assigns Cassidy moralistic hindsight in his golden years."