HollywoodandFine.com Andrew Niccol’s film of “The Host” starts so well that, when it suddenly slows to a crawl 20 minutes later, your impulse is to give it some slack – to let it find its feet and get back on track. Unfortunately, it never does. So what you end up …
By Armond White Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends …
HollywoodandFine.com A couple of weeks ago, someone I know, after scanning the movie listings of a Friday newspaper (and really, I’m dating that person just by identifying them as an actual newspaper reader), asked me, “When will we get some good movies?” Without missing a beat, I said, “Maybe October.” …
HollywoodandFine.com Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines” is a sure-handed effort from a director who proved himself capable of dramatizing difficult human emotions in “Blue Valentine.” “Pines,” opening Friday (3/29/13) in limited release, is perhaps the most linear film of the year. It deals with an overarching theme, even …
By Armond White At first Michel Gondry’s The We and the I is charming and then it’s scary. It starts with a delightfully, deliberately crude F/X of a boom box style city bus traversing the rough streets of The Bronx–a toy-like transformation that gets smashed into realism: An actual city …
HollywoodandFine.com There are movies about movies. And then there are meta-movies like “Room 237,” opening in limited released Friday (3/29/13). Think of it as the movie-buff’s equivalent of the “Paul McCartney is dead” rumor that swept the world in 1969. People who should have known better came to the conclusion …
HollywoodandFine.com A second-rate “Die Hard” knock-off with Gerard Butler playing the Bruce Willis role, “Olympus Has Fallen” is preposterously overblown, an action movie that seems to prove the old saying: If brains were gunpowder, this movie wouldn’t have enough to blow its own nose. Directed by Antoine Fuqua – who …
HollywoodandFine.com A small but compelling story, “No Place on Earth” excavates the lost tale of one Ukrainian family’s survival during the Holocaust, when they hid in a series of deep caves that would intimidate even veteran spelunkers. Indeed, this documentary by Janet Tobias was inspired by the findings of one …
HollywoodandFine.com Ahhh, romantic comedy, that most elusive of genres: often attempted, so rarely successfully. You can count on one hand the number of good romantic comedies in any given year. Not that people aren’t making them – they just don’t do them very well. Which is why “Admission” is such …
HollywoodandFine.com Funny, surprising and full of heart, the French-Canadian comedy “Starbuck” has nothing to do with coffee (that name, after all, came from a character in “Moby-Dick”) and everything to do with redefining notions of family. Directed by Ken Scott from a script he wrote with Martin Petit, the film …
