HollywoodandFine.com I’ve seen what feels like a surprising number of movies that genuinely excited and moved me this year, films as different as “The Descendants” and “Drive” – both of which are on my 10-best list below. “The Descendants” is my favorite film of the year for its ability to …
HollywoodandFine.com From time to time, I offer an installment in my “Annals of the Overrated.” But I don’t believe director David Gordon Green is worth an entire installment – so let this review of his latest film, “The Sitter,” serve as his induction. Consider him officially overrated. Green, you may …
HollywoodandFine.com Thrillers and spy tales have devolved in movies to a hash of slice’n’dice editing, prefabricated plots and outlandish action and gunplay that makes all espionage into James Bond or, worse, a video game. Which is why “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is such a welcome relief. Like the John Le …
HollywoodandFine.com When is a comedy not a comedy? When it’s one of what apparently is becoming a series of holiday-themed movies by Garry Marshall. “Valentine’s Day” was the 2010 date movie from hell – an all-star cluster-grope that had fewer laughs than a rerun of “Laverne & Shirley,” Marshall’s signature …
HollywoodandFine.com People in Minnesota have this reputation for being “nice” that Diablo Cody seems determined to undermine – which she does in slashingly funny style in Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult,” opening in limited release Friday (12/9/11) before going wide on Dec. 16. The film reteams the “Juno” duo with a …
HollywoodandFine.com Perhaps I’m not qualified to write about “Sleeping Beauty,” the debut film from Australian director Julia Leigh. I am, after all, a middle-aged man. And this meandering movie, which manages to make nudity monotonous and presents sex as a distasteful commercial venture, seems to be about a kind of …
HollywoodandFine.com Never a popular part of the Shakespeare canon, “Coriolanus” (opening in limited released Friday, 12/2/11) bears a peculiar timeliness, in the muscular directorial debut by Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes directed and stars in this film, which transposes Shakespeare’s drama about a career soldier forced to cope with political reality to …
HollywoodandFine.com Takeshi Kitano has always been a rule-breaker so it’s no surprise that “Outrage,” his latest gangster film, should foil expectations. A good part of that has to do with Kitano himself. Cast as a yakuza underboss in a violent, almost Shakespearean tale of double-dealing underworld power struggles, Kitano lets …
HollywoodandFine.com The fact that the dim-witted and near-sighted MPAA has slapped an NC-17 rating on Steve McQueen’s “Shame” implies that there is something prurient about this film, whose central figure is a sex addict, struggling with his demons. But, as intense and involving as this film is, the last thing …
David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” is about the talking cure – specifically, the kind of talk therapy pioneered by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung at the start of the 20th century. Freud and Jung, however, nearly talk the audience to death in Cronenberg’s bloodless, pokey film. Though his cast – …