HollywoodandFine.com An all-star comedy in the same vein as such crowd-pleasers as “The Full Monty,” “Calendar Girls” and other British charmers, John Madden’s “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is the kind of movie they seldom make anymore – except in England. When they try to do it in America, you …
HollywoodandFine.com Boaz Yakin’s “Safe” is high-octane silliness, a movie whose individual parts are greater than their sum. The plot, in a script Yakin wrote, pulls in strands of everything from cage fighting to the Russian mob. And then it sets Jason Statham loose in a world where he is the …
HollywoodandFine.com “The Five-Year Engagement” wrings a slightly different change on the old boy-meets-girl formula – and finds enough big laughs to make the whole thing enjoyable, even if it’s never particularly fresh. Written by Jason Segel and Nick Stoller (who also directed), “Engagement” brings together the same mix of the …
HollywoodandFine.com Richard Linklater has made a career of defying expectations, making everything from “The Bad News Bears” and “School of Rock” to “A Scanner Darkly” and now “Bernie.” “Bernie” might be his most unexpected film yet. Based on a true story about events and people in a small Texas town …
HollywoodandFine.com Bob Marley was a seminal figure in popular music in the post-Beatles era: not the first person to introduce reggae to the radio but the first reggae superstar – and one of the first superstars to emerge from the Third World. So “Marley” is a welcome documentary, one that …
HollywoodandFine.com It says something about the state of romantic comedies today that the ideas in a movie like “Think Like a Man” – or in books like Steve Harvey’s “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” on which it’s based – will come as news to anyone. Not that …
HollywoodandFine.com “To the Arctic,” like the cable series “Frozen Planet” and other films of the type, provides a precious historical record. At some point in the future, as man-made climate change raises global temperatures and causes the polar ice caps to melt even faster, we will no longer have species …
HollywoodandFine.com A film that took more than four years and an extravagant amount of luck to make, “Chimpanzee” is an exceptional wildlife movie that should hold the interest of viewers from youngest to oldest. Shot in the jungles of Africa, this film by directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield focuses …
HollywoodandFine.com What can we learn from “Fightville,” a documentary from the team that made “Gunners Palace” about a minor-league circuit of professional mixed-martial arts fighting? The obvious takeaway from this film by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker is that life within this sport of violence has tamed the beast within …
HollywoodandFine.com There haven’t been many movies based on the books by Nicholas Sparks that are much easier to swallow than Sparks’ prose. But a good director with a creative screenwriter can distill a touching romance out of even Sparks’ overblown best-sellers. Indeed, I’m sure there are those who will be …
HollywoodandFine.com To the canon of films about the financial collapse of 2008, add Marc Simon’s “Unraveled,” a portrait of one man’s hubris, insecurity and appetite for glory, writ large. That man is Marc Dreier, arrested at the end of 2008 for a massive financial fraud but overshadowed in the headlines …
HollywoodandFine.com “How to Grow a Band” is a perfect example of a missed opportunity: a front-row seat at the creation of a new artistic venture, in a film that never does more than skim the surface. Director Mark Meatto apparently had exceptional access to superstar bluegrass mandolinist Chris Thile (pronounced …
HollywoodandFine.com In “Lockout,” we have a prison-escape film that features an actor in search of literal escape – from this film. As fun and wisecracky as Guy Pearce gets, as a former CIA agent named Snow, his eyes betray a “get me out of this POS” franticness that’s impossible to …
HollywoodandFine.com If you think you’ve seen “The Cabin in the Woods” before, well, you’re half-right. You’ve definitely seen movies along the same lines. But I’d also wager that you’ve never seen anything like it. Directed by Drew Goddard from a script by Goddard and Joss Whedon, “The Cabin in the …