HollywoodandFine.com Cult hits are exactly that for a reason. They’re movies that appeal to a small, feverishly loyal audience who, in most cases, love them either in spite of the fact that they’re terrible (“Rocky Horror Picture Show”) or because they’re terrible (“The Room”) – or perhaps a mixture of …
HollywoodandFine.com Apparently we’re going to have a bumper crop of outstanding thrillers this season – “Gravity,” the upcoming “All Is Lost” (well, not technically a thriller but still intense) – and now “Captain Phillips.” Where the first two are fiction, Pal Greengrass’ latest film finds him returning to a story …
HollywoodandFine.com When it happened in the spring of 2012, the Jeremy Lin phenomenon – commonly referred to as “Linsanity,” from which the new documentary takes its name – was startling for its prevalence. As Evan Leong’s new film shows, the excitement in New York was infectious. It spread worldwide – …
HollywoodandFine.com Fifty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “Parkland” still has the power to hit you like a fast-moving bus. A recreation of Nov. 22, 1963, as seen through the eyes of people who were directly involved, Peter Landesman’s film has the immediacy of a documentary, though it …
HollywoodandFine.com Paul Giamatti is one of our great screen actors, an absolute poet of frustration and regret with the range to play a wide variety of roles. Watch him in Tom McCarthy’s delightful “Win Win” and then in “Cold Souls” and then in “American Splendor.” He can play everything from …
HollywoodandFine.com Not since “127 Hours” have I run into a movie that provoked that mixture of excitement and trepidation in people I know who have seen the trailer as “Gravity.” The excitement is understandable. The trailers make it look like exactly what it is, which is a harrowing, white-knuckle tale …
HollywoodandFine.com Some actors attract you because of their openness: What you see is what you get, in all its honesty and candor. But other actors pull you in with their mystery: They present a face that seems to offer any number of interpretations. You don’t quite know what they’re thinking …
HollywoodandFine.com Here’s what I loved about this year’s Emmy Awards: Well, nothing, really – I didn’t watch them. I avoid award shows like they were herpes – and they tend to spread just that easily. But there was one thing I thought of afterward that did make me smile: all …
HollywoodandFine.com The 51st New York Film Festival kicks off tonight, with a lineup that runs the gamut from mainstream action (“Captain Phillips”) to Spike Jonze’s latest, “Her” (his first since critics and the public unjustly crucified his film of “Where the Wild Things Are” for not being a warm and …
HollywoodandFine.com The Republican noise machine has become such an overpowering presence in our world – manipulating the media with its messages, preying on the fear of the uninformed – that the whole idea of facts (the reality-based world, as someone in George W. Bush’s administration so dismissively put it) seems …