HollywoodandFine.com They used to make films like “A Walk Among the Tombstones” on a regular basis: mysteries built around flawed heroes, in which character was as important as plot, and action was the catharsis, not the reason for the story itself. Scott Frank, who directs and adapted the film from …
HollywoodandFine.com “Art and Craft” is a potent title that can be taken in several different ways, in this fascinatingly complex and endlessly entertaining documentary from a trio of filmmakers: Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker. It examines the conflicting notions of art and imitation, finding an extremely bizarre middle …
HollywoodandFine.com There is a growing canon of films built around a man/woman-alone against the elements. Two of last year’s most gripping films – “Gravity” and “All Is Lost” – and two to come shortly focus on the tininess of man in nature and the lengths and limits of his strength …
HollywoodandFine.com I wrote a long piece a couple years ago, about why I refused to review the third “Transformers” movie: because the first two sucked, because Michael Bay is the Antichrist, because life is too short to spend watching make-believe computer-animated robots fight each other. I could go on and …
HollywoodandFine.com Paul Haggis’ “Third Person” may be the year’s most misunderstood film. It’s also one of the most intriguing. A jigsaw puzzle of characters and plots, it might remind some at first of “Crash,” Haggis’ Oscar-winning multiple-character drama. But “Third Person” has a different agenda. Initially, we see three different …
HollywoodandFine.com After I saw “22 Jump Street,” I noted publicly that, while it was funnier than “21 Jump Street,” so was my root canal. (Although the latter did include laughing gas.) Still, the bar wasn’t particularly high. So why is this film currently floating atop the Rotten Tomatoes chart with …
HollywoodandFine.com When you consider that Tom Cruise has been a major movie star for more than three decades, it’s surprising how few out-and-out stinkers he’s made (can Tom Hanks say the same thing?) and how much of himself he can still hold in reserve, with which to surprise us in …
HollywoodandFine.com I’m not going to apologize for laughing my ass off at Seth MacFarlane’s “A Million Ways to Die in the West.” And I’m not going to compare it to “Blazing Saddles.” Yes, they’re both spoofs of westerns with their own unique brand of gross-out humor. But that’s as far …
HollywoodandFine.com If you’re keeping score at home, of the three Marvel comic-book movies so far this summer (a term I use advisedly for a season that technically doesn’t start for another month), “X-Men: Days of Future Past” outranks “Amazing Spider-Man 2” and is about on a par with “Captain America: …
HollywoodandFine.com Here’s a misleading metric: This new film of “Godzilla” is miles above Roland Emmerich’s turgid mess of a film from 1998, which starred an embarrassed-looking Matthew Broderick and a bemused Jean Reno. Duh. There are lots of movies that make Gareth Edwards’ new “Godzilla” look like a masterpiece. That, …