HollywoodandFine.com After all the hype about its supposedly mind-blowing revelations about the late J.D. Salinger, Shane Salerno’s “Salinger” turns out to be a hype – an overblown, overlong documentary about a famous writer, with little that is either truly revelatory or earth-shaking, at least if you’ve been paying attention at …
HollywoodandFine.com Hannah Fidell’s “A Teacher,” opening in limited release this week, is exactly the kind of movie I love to discover at film festivals: small, low-budget, without famous faces – but with a strong dramatic vision and the intelligence to carry it out with minimal resources. It seems like a …
By Armond White After decades of inspired, always modern, genre-revising work, Brian DePalma finally goes derivative in Passion. His remake of Alain Corneau’s 2010 Crime d’amore isn’t up to the level of that well-cast but trashy film. DePalma merely rehashes its plot–moving the story from Paris to Berlin where a …
HollywoodandFine.com “Getaway” is like the ultimate reductionist car-centric action film. It feels less like a movie made from an actual script and more like director Courtney Solomon composed a list of things he wanted to put in, then assembled those items into something that vaguely resembled a movie. If there …
By Armond White Like molasses in January, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a slow-moving, dull cliché, an art cliché. Director David Lowery tediously imitates the style of 1970s American Renaissance movies in this agonizing tale of an outlaw couple Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) in 1930s Texas. But …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ll admit it. I have a critic’s crush on Kathryn Hahn. Jill Soloway’s witty, surprising “Afternoon Delight” only confirms it. I’ve been a Hahn fan for a number of years; I celebrated when she landed the lead (opposite Hank Azaria) of a sit-com called “Free Agents” (and mourned when …
By Armond White Rappers were always welcomed by the art world–a fact of the downtown avant-garde as captured in Blondie’s 1981 Rapture music video–even before Kanye West and Jay-Z deliberately sought art world approval. Jay-Z’s new music video Picasso Baby not only crosses the Black Curtain of limited, ghettoized knowledge, …
HollywoodandFine.com A fascinating patchwork of news footage and home movies, “Our Nixon” is at once intriguing and compelling, an inside peek at people who seemed to make secrecy a watchword. Indeed, Richard Nixon’s presidential administration was as secretive as they came – at least until the Reagan years (and then …
HollywoodandFine.com “Passion” isn’t Brian De Palma’s first remake, but it may be his worst: an over-inflated, melodramatically hot-blooded version of what was a cool French thriller. The French film, 2010’s “Love Crimes” from Alain Corneau, starred Ludivine Sagnier as the ambitious but mild-mannered No. 2 to a snaky executive played …
HollywoodandFine.com The paranoia that a terrorist attack – and the resultant media clusterpluck – creates is palpable. Don’t believe it? Hello – the Patriot Act? An overreaching NSA? So John Crowley’s “Closed Circuit,” arriving in the wake of the Bradley Manning decision and the ongoing Edward Snowden affair, is more …
