HollywoodandFine.com “Kick-Ass 2” is every bit as stupid as this photograph makes it look. I remember hating 2010’s “Kick-Ass” as being sadistic, unexciting and not funny enough. It had a ton of style, thanks to director Matthew Vaughn, but not a lot of wit or brains. When I went back …
HollywoodandFine.com There are moments in “The Butler” – excuse me, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” – that make you cringe a little because they’re so on the nose. And yet I walked away from Daniels’ film deeply moved. As obvious as this film can be in its messages – bigotry and …
HollywoodandFine.com Niels Arestrup may be the most commandingly passive-aggressive father figure in the current cinema. In films such as “A Prophet,” the upcoming “Our Children” and, this week, “You Will Be My Son,” the leonine Arestrup plays a series of patriarchs with distinctly ambivalent relationships with their sons (though he …
HollywoodandFine.com The fact that porn has become such a punchline in our culture – something that is joked about in mainstream humor as an indicator of all that is horny, male and, often, lower-class – is hard to believe, from the perspective of the social history captured in “Lovelace.” A …
HollywoodandFine.com Anyone who thought “District 9” might be some sort of newcomer fluke needs only watch the first few minutes of “Elysium” to see that Neill Blomkamp is the real thing: a visionary filmmaker with a headful of dystopia and the story-telling ability to give it some punch. Blomkamp used …
By Armond White The secular tendency that dominates today’s movies makes the spiritual inquiry in The Gardener (showing at The Quad) even more remarkable. It is the bold new film by one of the great international moviemakers, Iran’s Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who typically, transcends genre; here mixing the religious feeling of …
HollywoodandFine.com Comedy is subjective, so there are bound to be haters for “We’re the Millers.” But, speaking as someone who enjoys vulgar humor that is both mean and smart, I can tell you that I laughed a lot during this brisk, consistently funny movie. It was one of those films …
HollywoodandFine.com “In A World” announces the arrival of a new triple-threat talent: Lake Bell, already established as an actress. She wrote and directed (and produced) this new film, which was a delight at Sundance and arrives in the dog days of summer like a cool breeze. Bell plays Carol, who’s …
By Armond White Hard luck Lindsay Lohan couldn’t have made a worse movie than The Canyons had she directed it herself. As the film’s producer, she made the poor decision to hire Paul Schrader as director, putting herself in the hands of a filmmaker who reduces her to a T&A …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s been a lot of action at the movies this summer, very little of it memorable. So Baltasar Kormakur’s “2 Guns” comes as a welcome surprise: a film with the wit, tension and sheer headlong pace to grab and hold your attention for a brisk 106 minutes. Yes, that’s …
