HollywoodandFine.com Lynn Shelton obviously isn’t a filmmaker whose work suits everyone’s taste. With her lightly scripted, improvisational approach to movies, there’s a certain shaggy quality to her work – or at least to the films of hers I’ve seen (and liked): “Humpday” and “Your Sister’s Sister.” Add “Touchy Feely” to …
HollywoodandFine.com After all the hype about its supposedly mind-blowing revelations about the late J.D. Salinger, Shane Salerno’s “Salinger” turns out to be a hype – an overblown, overlong documentary about a famous writer, with little that is either truly revelatory or earth-shaking, at least if you’ve been paying attention at …
HollywoodandFine.com Hannah Fidell’s “A Teacher,” opening in limited release this week, is exactly the kind of movie I love to discover at film festivals: small, low-budget, without famous faces – but with a strong dramatic vision and the intelligence to carry it out with minimal resources. It seems like a …
HollywoodandFine.com “Getaway” is like the ultimate reductionist car-centric action film. It feels less like a movie made from an actual script and more like director Courtney Solomon composed a list of things he wanted to put in, then assembled those items into something that vaguely resembled a movie. If there …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ll admit it. I have a critic’s crush on Kathryn Hahn. Jill Soloway’s witty, surprising “Afternoon Delight” only confirms it. I’ve been a Hahn fan for a number of years; I celebrated when she landed the lead (opposite Hank Azaria) of a sit-com called “Free Agents” (and mourned when …
HollywoodandFine.com A fascinating patchwork of news footage and home movies, “Our Nixon” is at once intriguing and compelling, an inside peek at people who seemed to make secrecy a watchword. Indeed, Richard Nixon’s presidential administration was as secretive as they came – at least until the Reagan years (and then …
HollywoodandFine.com “Passion” isn’t Brian De Palma’s first remake, but it may be his worst: an over-inflated, melodramatically hot-blooded version of what was a cool French thriller. The French film, 2010’s “Love Crimes” from Alain Corneau, starred Ludivine Sagnier as the ambitious but mild-mannered No. 2 to a snaky executive played …
HollywoodandFine.com The paranoia that a terrorist attack – and the resultant media clusterpluck – creates is palpable. Don’t believe it? Hello – the Patriot Act? An overreaching NSA? So John Crowley’s “Closed Circuit,” arriving in the wake of the Bradley Manning decision and the ongoing Edward Snowden affair, is more …
HollywoodandFine.com So many films today seem to carry the same references to earlier work, indicating the influences that shaped the filmmaker in his work. But references are one thing; using those references for fresh inspiration is something else, and that’s what David Lowery has done with “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.” …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s nothing that terrible about Joshua Michael Stern’s “jOBS,” a skimpy, often overly specific film biography about the late Apple inventor, Steve Jobs. Still, it would be interesting to see this film with another actor playing Jobs. While Ashton Kutcher looks the part (actually, his face is rounder than …