HollywoodandFine.com Having broken through as a filmmaker with the intriguing and moving “The Freebie,” actress Katie Aselton suffers the sophomore slump with her second film as a director, “Black Rock.” Written by her husband, Mark Duplass, “Black Rock” is meant to be a “Deliverance”-style thriller, a girls-vs.-boys tale set on …
HollywoodandFine.com South Korean cinema has exploded internationally in the past decade or so. I won’t speculate about how South Korean society informs the consciousness of its filmmakers because, well, we probably only see a fraction of the output. It would be like basing your opinions of American culture on the …
By Armond White Frances Ha runs a very long 84 minutes. It offers an obnoxiously self-satisfied portrait of a young white New Yorker–played by Greta Gerwig–running out her parent’s stipend, roommating with other New York hipsters, sometimes skipping the pond to Paris, all the time pursuing her goal to be …
HollywoodandFine.com The conventional wisdom about the “Star Trek” movies starring the cast of the original TV show was that the even-numbered films were the good ones and the odd-numbered ones kind of sucked. That began to change when the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” movies kicked in; most of them …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve mostly been a fan of the films of Noah Baumbach but, with “Frances Ha,” he loses me. Never a filmmaker for whom story seemed particularly important, Baumbach collaborated here with his star, Greta Gerwig, for what feels like an amorphous and fragmentary story of a delusional young woman …
The world’s most capable youthful players gave India a significant show of top notch football on the field while the nation exhibited its hierarchical aptitudes in close perfect and record-breaking competition crosswise over six urban communities, which finished with England securing the title. Stuffed with players from the institutes of …
Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters Watching “Stories We Tell” feels like sharing a comfy couch beside a close friend — who happens to be an amazing storyteller with a show-stopping secret. In her third film as a writer-director (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”), the Canadian actress Sarah Polley, 34, …
HollywoodandFine.com Having made his name with the kind of horror films that inspired the term “torture-porn,” producer-writer Eli Roth tries to show that there are other tricks up his sleeve with “Aftershock.” Think of it as a 1970s’ disaster movie, spiked with 21st-century horror effects. Irwin Allen meets Robert Rodriguez. …
By Armond White The ad campaign for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is pretty snazzy, the movie itself is a mess. The poster’s anachronistic Art Deco silver-gold letters on a black grid evoke the chrome of shiny old Dusenbergs plus the velvet casing of jewelry boxes. It’s about luxury and …
HollywoodandFine.com Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is one of the year’s best films: funny, moving, thought-provoking – and so personal that it strikes universal chords. While critics often score indulgent filmmakers by referring to their efforts as “home movies,” Polley has turned that insult on its head. She takes her …
