HollywoodandFine.com It’s not that I don’t think David Fincher is a solid director. But I don’t think he’s the Second Coming either, though some of the reviews he tends to get would have you believe otherwise. What finally tore it was his version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” …
HollywoodandFine.com One of the intriguing phenomena of the 2008 election was the fact that, while African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama for president, that surge of black voters at the polls in California was one of the factors in the passage of Proposition 8, which rendered same-sex marriage illegal in …
HollywoodandFine.com Family dynamics make for potent drama – and few films this year have used that idea to better effect than Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” which made my 10-best list for 2011. The drama stems less from head-to-head conflict – though that comes, eventually – but from subtler things. Truth …
HollywoodandFine.com The focus isn’t even on her. We’re in a grungy British superette (as we used to call them in the Midwest) and some raucous music is playing loudly as an elderly woman shops for milk. It’s only because the camera turns its attention in her direction that we really …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s unusual to have Steven Spielberg competing with himself at the box office this holiday weekend, but there he is – with “The Adventures of Tintin” and now with “War Horse.” Based on the popular children’s book that inspired the Tony-winning Broadway production, “War Horse” is exactly what it …
HollywoodandFine.com Matt Damon has had a strong career playing hard-edged, serious guys like Jason Bourne or the title character in “Good Will Hunting.” So you forget his aptitude for comedy. He brought it to “30 Rock,” just as he did for the Farrelly brothers in “Stuck on You.” Still, I …
HollywoodandFine.com You would think that, after World War II, Europe had seen all of the genocide it could stomach for a century or so. But, no, here came the Serbs in the early 1990s, with their ethnic cleansing and wholesale butchery and rape of the Bosniak and Muslim population. There …
HollywoodandFine.com I keep want to referring to Stephen Daldry’s film of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” as, instead, “ ..& Incredibly Cute.” That’s unfair. It’s not even true; well, not completely. Still, the performance by young “Jeopardy” champion Thomas Horn as the central character of this movie …
Brian DePalma’s 1996 Mission Impossible was a cartoon even though he didn’t direct it like one. The sheer, exhilarating pleasure of Mission Impossible IV (officially subtitled Ghost Protocol) comes from star-producer Tom Cruise’s ingenious decision to cast animation master Brad Bird. This is easily Bird best film since The Iron …
By Armond White You can’t get you mind off Lady Gaga while watching David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Gaga, the ubiquitous pop star summoned up by the same self-loathing zeitgeist that popularized the Stieg Larsson crime novels as well as their Swedish TV-movie franchise, bears an uncanny …