HollywoodandFine.com It’s unusual to have Steven Spielberg competing with himself at the box office this holiday weekend, but there he is – with “The Adventures of Tintin” and now with “War Horse.” Based on the popular children’s book that inspired the Tony-winning Broadway production, “War Horse” is exactly what it …
HollywoodandFine.com Matt Damon has had a strong career playing hard-edged, serious guys like Jason Bourne or the title character in “Good Will Hunting.” So you forget his aptitude for comedy. He brought it to “30 Rock,” just as he did for the Farrelly brothers in “Stuck on You.” Still, I …
HollywoodandFine.com You would think that, after World War II, Europe had seen all of the genocide it could stomach for a century or so. But, no, here came the Serbs in the early 1990s, with their ethnic cleansing and wholesale butchery and rape of the Bosniak and Muslim population. There …
HollywoodandFine.com I keep want to referring to Stephen Daldry’s film of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” as, instead, “ ..& Incredibly Cute.” That’s unfair. It’s not even true; well, not completely. Still, the performance by young “Jeopardy” champion Thomas Horn as the central character of this movie …
HollywoodandFine.com Herge’s “Tintin” comics have been huge in France since they were first published in 1929, but have never quite translated to American popularity. In the 1990s, an animated version of Tintin stories showed up on American TV, on Nickelodeon – which was the go-to channel for my kids in …
HollywoodandFine.com You know a tent-pole movie series is in trouble when it has to explain its title in its dialogue. As in Tom Cruise saying, about midway through “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” to the rest of his crew, “We’re going to Ghost Protocol. Ghost Protocol is…” and then explaining …
HollywoodandFine.com What can you say about Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” that wasn’t said previously about Ritchie’s Baker Street reboot from 2009, “Sherlock Holmes”? That it’s bigger, louder and more expensive? That’s hardly a shock from a sequel. Indeed, it’s kind of de rigueur, right? How about …
HollywoodandFine.com Roman Polanski takes the experience of watching Yasmina Reza’s play, “God of Carnage,” and amplifies the tension, turns anger into absurdity and captures an entire universe in, essentially, two and a half rooms of a Brooklyn apartment, in the film, “Carnage.” The apartment belongs to Michael and Penelope Longstreet …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s hard to believe no one has done a film tribute to Roger Corman before “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel,” Alex Stapleton’s loving time-capsule of the career of one of the true independent filmmaking sensibilities of all time. Still active at a spritely 85, Corman is shown …
HollywoodandFine.com Actress Tilda Swinton seems caught in the role of mother of troubled teens and shepherdess of similar lost sheep. She’s played them with quiet panic (as the mom of a suspected murderer in “The Deep End”) and bluster (the title role in “Julia,” sudden guardian in an ill-planned kidnapping). …