HollywoodandFine.com It always seems niggardly to refer to a Pixar film as a great animated comedy. “Animated” seems almost like a pejorative; at a minimum, it seems to diminish the accomplishment of a comedy because, well, aren’t all cartoons funny? Of course not – you don’t need to be a …
HollywoodandFine.com “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” Noel Coward wrote in his play, “Private Lives.” It certainly makes a difference in Paul Andrew Williams’ “Unfinished Song,” a so-so old-age dramedy that mostly avoids easy laughs but isn’t afraid to use sentimentality to pound its point home. The film is part …
HollywoodandFine.com No one, it is said, knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage. Even more to the point, no one can know what’s going on in another person’s head. Those notions are among many at the crux of Ziad Doueiri’s haunting, provocative “The Attack,” based on the novel by …
HollywoodandFine.com This was originally going to be a piece about how wrong it was for Will Smith to remake “The Wild Bunch.” But that metastasized into an idea about remakes and reboots in general. So I wound up simply writing an open letter to Smith about “The Wild Bunch” – …
HollywoodandFine.com Zack Snyder widens his view as a director with “Man of Steel,” taking a proclivity for creating startling images in the service of storytelling and using it to enlarge and expand the action. As a result, “Man of Steel” works as a compelling big-screen blockbuster because Snyder doesn’t treat …
HollywoodandFine.com Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery. But what if you want to imitate someone so badly that you’re willing to steal from them? Where does that fall on the sincerity meter? That’s just one of the issues raised in Sofia Coppola’s drily witty and up-to-the-minute …
HollywoodandFine.com What if they gave a Rapture and you weren’t invited? That was the idea behind Michael Tolkin’s 1991 film “The Rapture,” as well as Tom Perrotta’s 2009 novel, “The Leftovers.” What if you were a skeptic – and your very skepticism resulted in you missing out on the very …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s hard to imagine another documentary this year that will be as uplifting, entertaining and moving as Morgan Neville’s “20 Feet From Stardom.” A sensation at this year’s Sundance festival, “20 Feet” looks at a group of people who normally don’t feel the spotlight’s heat – the backup singer. …
HollywoodandFine.com A semi-jigsaw-puzzle of a story, Kieran Darcy-Smith’s “Wish You Were Here” bounces back and forth in time, while feeding the audience’s interest in an unsolved mystery. Even as it deals with a marriage hanging by a thread, it examines the nature of guilt and unveils new facets before finally …
HollywoodandFine.com Opening in very limited released today, “The Iran Job” is an intriguing look inside what Americans see as a buttoned-up and forbidding culture: life in Iran. Indeed, even as filmmaker Till Schauder follows American basketball player Kevin Sheppard playing professional basketball for the Shiraz team, a newcomer to the …