HollywoodandFine.com “Starlet,” opening Friday (11/9/12) in limited release, may be one of the year’s most surprising little movies, a tough-minded, low-budget tale that never quite leads you where it seems to be going. Not that where it’s going is somewhere you’d choose for yourself. But writer-director Sean Baker hooks you …
HollywoodandFine.com Don’t know much about history – but you don’t have to in order to be captivated by Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” Instead of making a conventional biopic, Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner chose to use a single month of Lincoln’s presidency – January, 1865 – to examine the character, power …
HollywoodandFine.com You’re as old as you feel – unless you’re James Bond. Then you’re both ageless and timeless. But as “Skyfall,” the newest adventure of 007, shows, even the world’s most dangerous secret agent needs to keep up with the times. And so director Sam Mendes and a trio of …
HollywoodandFine.com There are pleasures to be had from Yaron Zilberman’s “A Late Quartet,” opening in limited release today (11/2/12), principally having to do with its treatment of group dynamics battling artistic temperaments. The question is whether those are sufficient to warrant sitting through the rest of it. Set in the …
HollywoodandFine.com Anyone who has ever been caught up in the videogame revolution that exploded in the late 1970s and early 1980s – which has all but consumed popular culture for kids and teens in the time since – should have a ball with “Wreck-It Ralph.” But you don’t need to …
HollywoodandFine.com The commercials for “Flight” are a dazzling bit of bait-and-switch. If you’ve seen them, then your impression of the film is probably something along the lines of: A pilot saves an airliner from a seemingly certain crash, then must fight for his reputation against dark forces that want to …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve often said that the most influential films of the past 25 years were “Pulp Fiction” and “The Matrix,” two movies that have been copied endlessly by filmmakers who had nary a clue as to what these films were actually doing. It’s a list to which I’d also add …
HollywoodandFine.com “Fun Size” is no fun at any size. A limp teen comedy about teens searching for both a party and a lost child, “Fun Size” has fewer laughs than a half-hour of the average Nickelodeon sitcom – and that’s pretty damn few. Which makes sense because it’s a Nickelodeon …
HollywoodandFine.com There are a lot of ways Lorraine Levy could have gone with the premise of “The Other Son,” opening in limited release Friday. Thankfully, she took the least-expected one. A switched-at-birth tale, “The Other Son” raises the stakes on what is already an emotionally charged situation. Her story – …
HollywoodandFine.com David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” is a fascinating puzzle of a novel, with stories broken in half, then reassembled in a way that gives each added resonance and power. It seems like an unfilmable book because of its construction (more on that in a moment). But Mitchell has met his …