By Armond White “The room should feel empty when you’re in it,” says Clarence Williams III, instructing his waiter-trainee on the etiquette of black servitude in Lee Daniels’ The Butler. It’s a funny line for this film since director Lee (Precious) Daniels always makes a big noise when he enters …
HollywoodandFine.com “Ex Machina” is both tastily minimal and frustratingly simplistic. Alex Garland’s directing debut (he wrote “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine”) is, in essence, a three-hander about three people in a house. OK, a high-tech mansion, but you get the point. Yet, after tantalizing us with increasingly imaginative developments and …
HollywoodandFine.com Even as the brain-dead “Godzilla” is somehow getting a pass in its early reviews, you can bet that “Million Dollar Arm” is going to get savaged by the same critics, who are uncomfortable with movies that deal, ultimately, with feelings instead of ideas (or, in the case of “Godzilla,” …
By Armond White If Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte opened today, it would be the best film of 2013–and the most relevant. Though originally released in 1962, Antonioni’s masterpiece speaks to the crisis of affluence and license that also describes our contemporary social conundrum where the acceptance of capitalist privilege (and …
HollywoodandFine.com Dear Steven Soderbergh: Please don’t stop making movies. Your name is high on the list of filmmakers whose careers I’m thankful have coincided with my career as a movie critic. And “Side Effects” is further proof that you are at the height of your powers as a filmmaker. There’s …
HollywoodandFine.com Jonathan Levine’s “Warm Bodies” won the weekend box-office race for a couple of reasons. It’s a romantic comedy that works, for one thing. For another, it’s a smart reworking of “Romeo and Juliet.” And, finally, it takes the zombie genre someplace it hasn’t been before – though, at this …
HollywoodandFine.com “Ruby Sparks” could be a tasty bit of magical realism in romantic-comedy form, the first produced screenplay by actress Zoe Kazan, who plays the title character. Except for one serious problem. Directed by the “Little Miss Sunshine” team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, “Ruby Sparks” should be the …
The Duplass Gang Humps Again The Indie film movement may have some high points (your call) but it also commits innumerable disasters such as Your Sister’s Sister and Peace, Love and Misunderstanding. Each plot is undistinguished but Your Sister’s Sister’s plot is so poor it exposes how the Indie movement’s …
HollywoodandFine.com I will admit: I tend to have a bias against movies with the number “3” in the title. If there’s ever a dead giveaway that all imagination has been sapped from a movie, it’s that second sequel (as if the first sequel wasn’t bad enough). Sure, the filmmaker can …
HollywoodandFine.com Interesting the difference a few months can make. When I saw Tanya Wexler’s “Hysteria” last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, I enjoyed it for its perspective on how far we’ve come in terms of our attitudes toward women having control over their own bodies. Eight months later, “Hysteria,” …
