HollywoodandFine.com Denis Villeneuve had two films at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. The better one was called “Enemy.” The one that’s getting the big studio release this week is called “Prisoners.” Being sold with an adrenalized trailer featuring the histrionics of Hugh Jackman, “Prisoners” is meant to be a thriller. …
By Armond White Harvey Weinstein may call 2013 “a great moment” for “great black filmmakers” just because he happens to be releasing three high-profile films with Black subjects, but the year’s first real sign of new life and energy in movies about Black Americans is the low-budget Newlyweeds, written and …
HollywoodandFine.com Coming-of-age stories tend to be about innocents who have the veil pulled from their eyes. Which sort of describes “C.O.G.” – except for the innocent part. In fact, David (Jonathan Groff) is old enough to have finished grad school. Still, he’s lived a privileged life, relatively speaking, and longs …
By Armond White When the American mobster family the Blakes join the Witness Protection Program and relocate to a small town near Normandy in France, they soon learn what the natives think of them: “They expect color, noise, excess.” That’s also a comment on how the gangster genre is perceived …
HollywoodandFine.com Mid-life romance – the post-divorce kind – is tough all around. You’ve been burned or disappointed or humiliated or all of the above. How do you learn to trust someone new in that way? Nicole Holofcener brings a wonderfully humane approach to the subject with “Enough Said,” a bittersweet …
Hope for the best, don’t expect the worst. It’s my movie criticism mantra, but as the lights darkened at the Princess of Wales Theater for “Gravity’s” Canadian gala, already hailed as a masterpiece following a Venice Film Festival Premiere, it wasn’t just the fact that I was way up in …
By Armond White In the low-light neo-noir visual scheme of Blue Caprice, dark-skinned actor Isaiah Washington is automatically a silhouette, an emblematic obscure object of both dread and desire–the fear of and attraction toward murderous African American vengeance. Washington portrays John Muhammad, the elder member of the two-man team responsible …
By Armond White The Weinstein Company (formerly Miramax) really knows how to sell its product. They even sell a movie while you’re watching it which is the first problem with Shane Salerno’s Salinger. This bio-doc of the fiction writer J.D. Salinger, who became something of a recluse in the years …
By Armond White Westerns used to be called “shoot ‘em ups”–affectionately by moviegoers and industry insiders who enjoyed the genre’s familiar characters and routines, content that its visceral exercise would satisfy their common anxieties. Those anxieties are denied by today’s CGI, comic book-based spectacles based in juvenile naivete–and juvenile cynicism–that …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ll say this about “Adore”: It never goes where you expect it to. This Australian film, from director Anne Fontaine, was titled “Two Mothers” when it screened at Sundance in January, “The Grandmothers” when it was a short novel by Doris Lessing. “Adore” seems more descriptive, if more vague …
