By Armond White In the 1957 The Incredible Shrinking Man, a scientific experiment caused a man to experience the world in reverse scale–objects grew threateningly larger as his human potential (and possible death) decreased. That trauma is repeated in Jack the Giant Slayer, a reenactment of the “Jack the Beanstalk” …
HollywoodandFine.com A roiling visual extrusion rendered from computer-generated imagery, “Jack the Giant Slayer” makes you long for the days of Ray Harryhausen. With his sometimes jerky stop-motion animation that was state-of-the-art movie magic for decades, Harryhausen somehow convinced you more thoroughly that his characters were alive and had feelings and …
HollywoodandFine.com Chan-wook Park’s “Stoker” is audaciously, in-your-face creepy and exhilarating in a way few films have been since David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Because it’s not just the creepiness – but the way Park gets you involved in his world so that you can’t look away. Written by Wentworth Miller (yeah, …
HollywoodandFine.com You watch a documentary like “A Place At the Table” and it makes you wonder about all the people who still regard large swaths of the population as takers. The thinking is that these people aren’t able to support themselves and their families because they don’t want to. They’d …
By Armond White It can’t be easy for children of famous filmmakers to escape their parents’ shadows. That’s the problem facing Francis Ford Coppola’s offspring, daughter Sofia and son Roman, the most talented of the two. Neither can seem to get out from under their father’s eminence but at least …
Italy 2, Hollywood 0 By Armond White Why are Italian filmmakers so good at political movies and Americans so bad? This week, Marco Bellocchio’s newest film Dormant Beauty has its US. Premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Elio Petri’s 1965 The Tenth Victim shows in a special …
HollywoodandFine.com In “Snitch,” Dwayne Johnson – still probably better known as The Rock – plays a normal guy pressed into action to help save his son from a 10-year stretch in prison because of the mandatory-minimum sentencing drug laws in Missouri, where the film is set. And that injustice – …
HollywoodandFine.com There are a number of people whose work I admire involved with “Inescapable.” So allow me to say some nice things about them before I talk about what is so wrong with this movie. The film is written and directed by Ruba Nadda, a Canadian director of Middle Eastern …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s rare that a filmmaker has more than one film out in a single year, unless they’re either making both features and documentaries – or they’re Steven Soderbergh. But Alex Karpovsky actually has two films out the same day: “Red Flag” and “Rubberneck.” They’re being released as a double-feature …
HollywoodandFine.com According to box-office pundits, “A Good Day to Die Hard” (on further reference: “Die Hard 5”) will be the big box-office winner this holiday weekend. It will reassert Bruce Willis’ box-office magnetism. And it will do it while kicking dirt on the aspirations of his two vintage rivals, Sylvester …