Tarsem Singh, the India-born director who made the visually breathtaking but criminally little seen The Fall a few years ago with his own funds, returns to studio filmmaking in a hugely successful way with the big budget Immortals, a gorgeous, bloody, fantastically thunderous fantasy epic drawn from Greek myths.
Read MoreLike Crazy was a very, very good movie, but not a romantic comedy, as the box might lead you to think. It’s more of a drama that chronicles the relationship between Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones), two young college students, he an American, and she a Brit, studying in Los Angeles. They fall [...]
Read MoreI’ve always looked forward to every Pedro Almodóvar film, since he is one of the few working directors who is actually enthusiastic about his forbears, and revels in the resultant formalism we see onscreen. To me, Volver was his crowning achievement, and one that I hoped he would build on to reach even greater heights. [...]
Read MoreMy review of the redo of Footloose reworks the title song to the best of my limited songwriting ability. If you know the song, it should be fun. If you don’t, just enjoy it as a poem.
Read MoreMartin Scorsese hasn’t heretofore been famous for making family-friendly movies with positive life-affirming messages, but there was never any reason to think he couldn’t do it well if the subject suited his tastes. I can’t think of a fairy tale that could dovetail with Scorsese’s passions much more closely than Hugo, an atmospheric kid-flick that [...]
Read MoreThe Myth of the American Sleepover is an independent film, directed by newcomer David Robert Mitchell, featuring a large cast of amateur actors. It’s set during the last week of summer, before school starts up again. The teens attend various parties and sleepovers, many of which overlap. The four storylines follow Maggie (Claire Sloma), Rob [...]
Read MoreThe name J. Edgar Hoover might elicit a sneer or a snicker from many people these days, but he’s certainly not a figure undeserving of a great biopic. He was a man with significant career accomplishments, ranging from the visionary to the dubious, along with an enigmatic and controversial private life. One might expect an [...]
Read MoreThe Way stars Martin Sheen as an eye doctor who goes to France after his son (the film’s director and one of Martin’s real life sons, Emilio Estevez) dies in an accident at the beginning of a pilgrimage. Once there, he decides the best way to honor Emilio is to do the pilgrimage himself, taking [...]
Read MoreThere is a problem in Hollywood these days. The ratio of excellent young actresses to actual scripts worthy of their talent is about 40 to 1, and it’s increasing every year. It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that, for actors under 30, the number of talented women far exceeds those of their [...]
Read MoreOnce upon a time, there was a television actor who was so ridiculously handsome he became a Tiger Beat heartthrob, a situation which so troubled him he has spent his entire career aiming not to be one. This actor, groomed for stardom, began taking roles in quirky, off-beat comedies where his looks rarely, if ever, [...]
Read More