HollywoodandFine.com “Ruby Sparks” could be a tasty bit of magical realism in romantic-comedy form, the first produced screenplay by actress Zoe Kazan, who plays the title character. Except for one serious problem. Directed by the “Little Miss Sunshine” team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, “Ruby Sparks” should be the …
HollywoodandFine.com The strangeness of truth compared to the limits of the human imagination gets a crystalline demonstration in Malik Bendjelloul’s “Searching for Sugar Man,” an award-winner at Sundance that lives up to the hype, opening in limited release Friday (7/27/12). If you haven’t heard the hype – or if you …
HollywoodandFine.com Schadenfreude, the feeling of happiness at the misfortunes of another, is a tempting thing – mean-spirited, to be sure, but tempting, nonetheless. That’s particularly true when dealing with characters like the ones at the center of Lauren Greenfield’s stunning documentary, “The Queen of Versailles.” But it’s hard to feel …
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Knight Rises, Culture Falls: How Internet fanaticism over The Dark Knight Rises overtook film culture By Armond White Already, The Dark Knight Rises has caused movie media to embarrass itself. Those front page headlines in both the Daily News (four stars) and New York Post (four stars) are heralds of …
HollywoodandFine.com You don’t have to believe in the paranormal to be intrigued by the premise of Rodrigo Cortes’ “Red Lights,” now playing in limited release. And you don’t have to be a nonbeliever to find the conclusion that this effort-laden film reaches unsatisfactory – indeed, to find it frustrating and …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s a certain rowdy spirit to Stephen Gyllenhaal’s “Grassroots,” now playing in limited release, that gives the fact-based comedy-drama a surprising vitality for a movie that seems so schematic. Based on a true story, the film stars Jason Biggs as a journalist named Phil Campbell, who is fired from …
The Citizen Kane of movie-musicas as legend would have it By Armond White The fact that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 Singin’ in the Rain was later to inspire art as different from itself and as unignorable as both Michael Jackson’s Black or White music video and Stanley Kubrick’s …
Their Own Private 9/11 Margaret’s DVD and Dust Bunnies rescue the elite By Armond White Advance word on the DVD release of Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret hailed it as a “masterpiece” yet no one calls it a good movie because it isn’t even that. It’s the latest event from our …
HollywoodandFine.com Gorgeously shot and acted with aching tragic truthfulness, Michael Winterbottom’s “Trishna” is a romance of depth and feeling. Part of that, of course, is the source material; Winterbottom, who also wrote the script, has transposed Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” to modern India, where class differences still hold …