HollywoodandFine.com The story is right there in the title of Alex Gibney’s furious new documentary: “The Armstrong Lie.” Gibney, as probing a documentarian as is working today, is obviously not the only person who’s angry at Lance Armstrong. The seven-time Tour de France victor disappointed millions of fans by routinely …
HollywoodandFine.com Kenneth Branagh’s “Thor” had a certain playfulness that pitted the ultra-serious world of Asgard, land of the Norse gods, against 21st-century USA. Now director Alan Taylor has taken the reins of the franchise and, with “Thor: The Dark World,” drains the fun from it. Instead, he focuses on this …
By Armond White Novelist Cormac McCarthy must have been a fan of Breaking Bad since he steals its byzantine plot–its essence–for The Counselor, the film billed as his “first original screenplay.” The combination cynicism-and-pretense that motivates this crime film about a lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who gains wealth from assisting clients …
HollywoodandFine.com In the Will Ferrell era of “Saturday Night Live,” there was a running bit: “Celebrity Jeopardy,” which always seemed to feature Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery, making rude jokes about Ferrell’s Alex Trebek. In one of those episodes, Tobey Maguire portrayed a semi-comatose Keanu Reeves, who kept muttering, “I …
HollywoodandFine.com I heard a lot of critics sniff at the inclusion of Richard Curtis’ “About Time” in this year’s New York Film Festival. The same cadre, no doubt, uses Curtis’ “Love, Actually” as an example of what’s wrong with romantic comedy. I’d like to demur. I happen to think that …
By Armond White In a third of the time it took Olivier Assayas to turn 70s terrorism into a epic hipster rave (replete with post-punk soundtrack) in Carlos, Costa-Gavras exposes the nature of social and financial compromise–moral terrorism–in Capital. This timely story of how Phenix Bank, a French financial institution, …
HollywoodandFine.com Having squandered most of this century’s first decade being a movie star, Matthew McConaughey has approached its second stanza as an actor. The results have been salutary. In a year in which he’s already turned in stellar work in “Mud,” after last year’s “Magic Mike” and “Killer Joe,” here …
HollywoodandFine.com Back in the days when he was still funny, Jay Leno used to have a routine about why an appreciation for the Three Stooges was a uniquely male phenomenon. It was dead-on. To that list of gender-specific entertainment geared to men, I’d add the willingness to watch and laugh …
By Armond White The New York Film Festival’s presentation of Blue is the Warmest Color repeats the Cannes slate along with such repulsive Festival-circuit fare like Jia Zhangke’s odious A Touch of Sin. Now we know what Spielberg, Hollywood director par excellence, was up against. Here’s how I suss out …
HollywoodandFine.com You could think of “Aftermath” as a Polish version of “12 Years a Slave”: a film that exhumes a shameful chapter in its nation’s history which some people would just as soon leave buried, rather than confront. Instead of slavery, however, “Aftermath” deals with Polish anti-semitism, as it was …
