HollywoodandFine.com “Family – it’s what really matters,” says Robert Miller (Richard Gere), or words to that effect, to a gathering in his posh Fifth Avenue townhouse that includes his wife (Susan Sarandon), grown children, grandchildren and friends, who have assembled to celebrate his 60th birthday. So, in Nicholas Jarecki’s entertaining, …
HollywoodandFine.com Casually brutal, drily (but only intermittently) funny and frequently just plain strange, the German “Snowman’s Land” is a gloomy comedy that’s funnier in theory than in practice. Walter (Jurgen Rissman) is a hired killer who kills the wrong man by mistake – and so is banished by his boss, …
HollywoodandFine.com Stories within stories – “The Words” sometimes threatens to swallow itself whole. The fact that it doesn’t is a tribute to writer-directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, whose intriguing script uses each of its plotlines to resonate with and reflect the others. The film starts with Dennis Quaid, as …
HollywoodandFine.com Ira Sachs’ “Keep the Lights On” starts with a credit montage of bad paintings. The fact that they’re all homoerotic in content has nothing to do with their quality, which is amateurish. His protagonist, Erik (Thure Lindhardt), is first seen cruising gay-sex phone chatlines looking for company. He finds …
HollywoodandFine.com Comedies in which women talk dirty and act stupid and horny – is this such a hard to genre to get right? It gives you renewed appreciation for “Bridesmaids,” which still stands as the contemporary template for the kind of comedy that always seems to come as a surprise …
HollywoodandFine.com Almost as soon as movies could talk, they were making films about the gangsters who came to prominence by supplying liquor to thirsty Americans who didn’t believe in the nanny-state laws against alcohol known as Prohibition. “Lawless,” however, is more of a post-Prohibition tale. Though it is set in …
HollywoodandFine.com At first glance, “The Good Doctor” seems like a pilot for a TV series we’ve seen seemingly dozens of times – most successfully in “E.R.” You’ve got the earnest, ambitious young resident, Dr. Martin Blake (Orlando Bloom – and what happened to HIS career?), dealing with his new assignment …
HollywoodandFine.com The best horror movies are the ones that hew closest to reality. I’m not talking slashers or serial killers (and certainly not the supernatural). But give me a realistic threat – with all the random, arbitrary tragedy that life dishes out everyday – and that’s scary to me. “The …
HollywoodandFine.com “Side by Side” should be required viewing in any film school worth its salt and, undoubtedly, will be. But as up-to-the-minute as it is, by next year, it undoubtedly will be dated. And, before long, it will be a curiosity. Why? Because director Christopher Kenneally goes directly at the …
HollywoodandFine.com Is it really so hard to make a funny, dirty sex comedy? Apparently so, judging from the recent, brain-dead “The Babymakers” – and now the laugh-challenged “For a Good Time, Call…” Not only isn’t it funny – it’s not sexy, either. This soggy pudding of a film stars Lauren …