By Armond White When Jean-Luc Godard showcased his great, long lateral-pan supermarket sequence in 1970’s Tout Va Bien, the metaphor provided an undeniable satire of the consumerist habit that typifies modern middle-class life even though no previous filmmaker had perceived the depth of such banality. Who could imagine that Godard’s …
Boris Karloff had appeared in something like 60 movies over 11 years before his first important part in Howard Hawks’ “The Criminal Code,” the first of his 13 film appearances in 1931, the year that ended with his breakthrough in “Frankenstein.” The Hawks film — his first release that year …
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HollywoodandFine.com Zack Snyder widens his view as a director with “Man of Steel,” taking a proclivity for creating startling images in the service of storytelling and using it to enlarge and expand the action. As a result, “Man of Steel” works as a compelling big-screen blockbuster because Snyder doesn’t treat …
HollywoodandFine.com Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery. But what if you want to imitate someone so badly that you’re willing to steal from them? Where does that fall on the sincerity meter? That’s just one of the issues raised in Sofia Coppola’s drily witty and up-to-the-minute …
By Armond White Sofia Coppola has finally made an interesting movie. The Bling Ring circles around Sofia’s typical poor-little-rich-girl subject by dramatizing that infamous group of Southern California high-school housebreakers who were fixated on such tabloid celebrities as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan whom they idolize, envy and then burglarize. …
HollywoodandFine.com What if they gave a Rapture and you weren’t invited? That was the idea behind Michael Tolkin’s 1991 film “The Rapture,” as well as Tom Perrotta’s 2009 novel, “The Leftovers.” What if you were a skeptic – and your very skepticism resulted in you missing out on the very …
By Armond White Filming a modern version of Shakespeare is nothing compared to Peter Bogdanovich’s essay on themes from Ernst Lubitsch in the 1975 At Long Last Love, now finally reissued on DVD from Fox Home Video. At the height of his fame and popularity, Bogdanovich embarked on his most …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s hard to imagine another documentary this year that will be as uplifting, entertaining and moving as Morgan Neville’s “20 Feet From Stardom.” A sensation at this year’s Sundance festival, “20 Feet” looks at a group of people who normally don’t feel the spotlight’s heat – the backup singer. …
HollywoodandFine.com A semi-jigsaw-puzzle of a story, Kieran Darcy-Smith’s “Wish You Were Here” bounces back and forth in time, while feeding the audience’s interest in an unsolved mystery. Even as it deals with a marriage hanging by a thread, it examines the nature of guilt and unveils new facets before finally …
By Armond White As a teenager discovering the pleasures of widescreen Hollywood spectaculars, MacKenna’s Gold (1969) has always been a thrill. It is still is (showing on TCM right now). J. Lee Thompson, the underrated action director who made fascinating late-era Charles Bronson vehicles (like the remarkable The White Buffalo), …
HollywoodandFine.com Opening in very limited released today, “The Iran Job” is an intriguing look inside what Americans see as a buttoned-up and forbidding culture: life in Iran. Indeed, even as filmmaker Till Schauder follows American basketball player Kevin Sheppard playing professional basketball for the Shiraz team, a newcomer to the …
HollywoodandFine.com The jokes practically write themselves for “The Internship,” or at least that would be the case if writers Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern were actually paying attention to this one-joke movie. Instead, this limp outing plays like an extended improv session, in which all of the best jokes wound …
HollywoodandFine.com “The Prey” is one of those high-energy suspense thrillers that the French seem to toss off effortlessly – then sit back helplessly as Americans muck up the remake. I dare you to watch this film and not spend the second half recasting it in your mind with American stars. …
