HollywoodandFine.com The Republican noise machine has become such an overpowering presence in our world – manipulating the media with its messages, preying on the fear of the uninformed – that the whole idea of facts (the reality-based world, as someone in George W. Bush’s administration so dismissively put it) seems …
By Armond White Maybe if Ron Howard hadn’t been the most adorable child actor in Hollywood history, he wouldn’t have gone on to be a filmmaker who makes everything banal–cutesifying every story, no matter the topic, into movies so dull and unoriginal reviewers reflexively–mistakingly–call them “well crafted.” Howard’s second career …
HollywoodandFine.com Either the title of the documentary “Muscle Shoals” resonates with you – in which case it resonates hard – or you have no idea what it means. But you should – or you should find out by watching the movie, one of the year’s most entertaining and enriching nonfiction …
HollywoodandFine.com As directorial debuts by actors go, “Don Jon” is an auspicious one. Too many of these projects are vanity affairs, the chance for the actor to try get all the focus. Alternatively, it’s a form of therapy, acted out in front of a camera and broadcast to the world. …
HollywoodandFine.com Ron Howard’s “Rush” is winning all sorts of praise as being daring (for taking on subject matter that apparently isn’t an automatic audience magnet), a throwback to the 1970s (when filmmakers took more risks) and just plain sexy and exciting. Yet I found it to be exactly as middlebrow …
By Armond White Two films on faith this week are not a coincidental appearance. They suggest a transition in culture from the prevailing agnosticism to spiritual awareness. One film is masterly, the other fumbling. In Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, Keller Dover is a modern man possessed of Biblical rage when his …
HollywoodandFine.com Denis Villeneuve had two films at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. The better one was called “Enemy.” The one that’s getting the big studio release this week is called “Prisoners.” Being sold with an adrenalized trailer featuring the histrionics of Hugh Jackman, “Prisoners” is meant to be a thriller. …
By Armond White Harvey Weinstein may call 2013 “a great moment” for “great black filmmakers” just because he happens to be releasing three high-profile films with Black subjects, but the year’s first real sign of new life and energy in movies about Black Americans is the low-budget Newlyweeds, written and …
HollywoodandFine.com Coming-of-age stories tend to be about innocents who have the veil pulled from their eyes. Which sort of describes “C.O.G.” – except for the innocent part. In fact, David (Jonathan Groff) is old enough to have finished grad school. Still, he’s lived a privileged life, relatively speaking, and longs …
By Armond White When the American mobster family the Blakes join the Witness Protection Program and relocate to a small town near Normandy in France, they soon learn what the natives think of them: “They expect color, noise, excess.” That’s also a comment on how the gangster genre is perceived …
HollywoodandFine.com Mid-life romance – the post-divorce kind – is tough all around. You’ve been burned or disappointed or humiliated or all of the above. How do you learn to trust someone new in that way? Nicole Holofcener brings a wonderfully humane approach to the subject with “Enough Said,” a bittersweet …
Hope for the best, don’t expect the worst. It’s my movie criticism mantra, but as the lights darkened at the Princess of Wales Theater for “Gravity’s” Canadian gala, already hailed as a masterpiece following a Venice Film Festival Premiere, it wasn’t just the fact that I was way up in …
By Armond White In the low-light neo-noir visual scheme of Blue Caprice, dark-skinned actor Isaiah Washington is automatically a silhouette, an emblematic obscure object of both dread and desire–the fear of and attraction toward murderous African American vengeance. Washington portrays John Muhammad, the elder member of the two-man team responsible …
By Armond White The Weinstein Company (formerly Miramax) really knows how to sell its product. They even sell a movie while you’re watching it which is the first problem with Shane Salerno’s Salinger. This bio-doc of the fiction writer J.D. Salinger, who became something of a recluse in the years …
