By Armond White David O. Russell goes to the 1970s to satirize contemporary Americana in American Hustle. If the title sounds both plain and pretentious, it takes a sense of humor like Russell’s to get over those hurdles and he does it with his new stock company of actors–great talents …
HollywoodandFine.com The only way I can imagine having fun watching “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” is if I were drunk enough to be really funny myself, watching it with a group of friends on TV in the comfort of my living room – “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-style. Even then, it …
HollywoodandFine.com Spike Jonze’s “Her” is the year’s most audacious trick: a film whose best (and longest) moments are simply dialogue between two lovers, figuring out their feelings about themselves and each other. If that sounds like “Before Midnight” or either of the other Richard Linklater talking-lovers movies, well, OK – …
By Armond White When an apparition of Bob Dylan appears in Inside Llewyn Davis, it underscores the Coen Brothers’ abiding ambivalence about their Jewishness. Dylan, the oracular pop-star-prophet -outsider from Minnesota (like the Coens) represents an advance on mainstream culture and power that troubles the Coen Brothers’ fascination with American …
By Armond White By shooting his new film Nebraska in black and white, writer-director Alexander Payne reveals his phoniness. The contemporary-set story about an old man, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) who travels from Montana to claim a Publisher’s Clearing House prize in the neighboring state Nebraska, has that stark, sad …
By Armond White As a filmmaker, professor and community leader, Spike Lee sends a rotten message to audiences, students, parents, etc. in Oldboy, his remake of Park Chan Wook’s 2003 horror fantasy. It’s the story of a man held prisoner in a charnel house/hotel then released, seeking ironic revenge for …
The members held their annual vote on Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013. Read on for the winners from this year.
HollywoodandFine.com We are awash in films examining the Beats and the roots of the generation shift that occurred from the late 1950s through the 1960s – but none with a clearer eye than Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis.” The film is a circular thing: It seems to end …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve been a fan of Spike Lee – if not of all of his movies – for 25 years. And I’ve found that, more often than not, he’s at his best when he’s directing someone else’s material – or someone else’s story. It was true of “The 25th Hour,” …
By Armond White Unlike David Fincher’s The Social Network, which burnished the legend of Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook while glamourizing the modern derangement of social values and personal relations, Chen Kaige gets directly to the social, spiritual point in his masterly new film Caught in the Web. Chen balances a …
