HollywoodandFine.com Philip Roth may be our greatest living writer. So why would he give himself over to filmmakers who would make a movie as dull, superficial and pedantic as “Philip Roth: Unmasked”? The film, which receives a special theatrical run starting this week at Film Forum in New York, will …
HollywoodandFine.com The history books won’t tell you the story of U.S. Marine Gen. Bonner Fellers that you see in “Emperor.” Which is just as well because Fellers’ real story is more chaotic and less overtly heroic than the character portrayed by Matthew Fox in Peter Webber’s new film. Fox is …
HollywoodandFine.com The first time a major feature film came out with this title, it was a 1963 entry by the late Ingmar Bergman – not exactly the Judd Apatow of the Swedes. Now here comes Swiss filmmaker Baran bo Odar with “The Silence,” a film about a serial killer in …
Hollywoodandfine.com You absolutely don’t have to be a fan of the rock group Journey to enjoy Ramona Diaz’s “Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey.” Because I’m not. Really. Not to put too fine a point on it, but as someone who was working as a rock critic for the first decade …
HollywoodandFine.com Though Ray Winstone has been a TV star in Great Britain since the mid-1970s, a lot of Americans got their first sighting of the beefy British actor with Gary Oldman’s 1997’s “Nil By Mouth” or 2000’s “Sexy Beast.” Since then, he’s created a small niche for himself in American …
HollywoodandFine.com By its nature, movies set aboard submarines should come with built-in suspense. If the story is set during a war, well, there’s always the threat of attack. Even during peacetime, submarines are tense settings: the claustrophobia factor, the ever-present possibility of mechanical failure, that whole trapped-at-the-bottom of the ocean …
HollywoodandFine.com A roiling visual extrusion rendered from computer-generated imagery, “Jack the Giant Slayer” makes you long for the days of Ray Harryhausen. With his sometimes jerky stop-motion animation that was state-of-the-art movie magic for decades, Harryhausen somehow convinced you more thoroughly that his characters were alive and had feelings and …
HollywoodandFine.com Chan-wook Park’s “Stoker” is audaciously, in-your-face creepy and exhilarating in a way few films have been since David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Because it’s not just the creepiness – but the way Park gets you involved in his world so that you can’t look away. Written by Wentworth Miller (yeah, …
HollywoodandFine.com You watch a documentary like “A Place At the Table” and it makes you wonder about all the people who still regard large swaths of the population as takers. The thinking is that these people aren’t able to support themselves and their families because they don’t want to. They’d …
HollywoodandFine.com In “Snitch,” Dwayne Johnson – still probably better known as The Rock – plays a normal guy pressed into action to help save his son from a 10-year stretch in prison because of the mandatory-minimum sentencing drug laws in Missouri, where the film is set. And that injustice – …