HollywoodandFine.com “The Purge” is a high-concept blunt instrument of a thriller, a movie that offers a straightforward set-up and few subsequent surprises. It does exactly what you expect and doesn’t really go anywhere you don’t assume it will. The premise is devilishly simple: In the future, the government has eliminated …
By Armond White In his essential book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, professor Dick Hebdige remarked that “the history of post-war British youth culture must be reinterpreted as a succession of differential responses to the black immigrant presence in Britain from the 1950s onward.” This appears to be Julian Temple’s …
HollywoodandFine.com I want to applaud Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing” for all the things it does right, and I will. But Whedon’s side project – between his various TV and Marvel-related entertainments – gets one thing unfortunately wrong: It’s never very funny. Much of that has to do with …
HollywoodandFine.com Geoffrey Fletcher’s filmmaking debut, “Violet & Daisy,” is the summer’s oddest, most original treat. Imagine a script by Quentin Tarantino, directed by Wes Anderson – and you have an idea of just how deliciously surprising this film can be. It opens Friday (6/7/13) in limited release. The opening scene …
HollywoodandFine.com Shown at Sundance under the title “Toy’s House,” Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ “The Kings of Summer” is a coming-of-age tale that touches a lot of bases and explores a variety of tones in ways that most films are too timid to do. Based on a witty, imaginative script by Chris Galletta, …
By Armond White Boys without fathers are the target audience for Will Smith’s After Earth. Its story of a boy Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) trying to live up to his father Cypher Raige’s (Will Smith) survivalist code is a potential blockbuster, combing futuristic whimsy with street hardness (and its opposite: …
By Armond White The Tribeca Film Festival gave a good headstart to this year’s summer movie releases. Tribeca’s best offerings previewed what to look forward to, taking the guess work out of Hollywood blockbusters and art house fare. Fact is, some of summer’s most exciting and challenging films got their …
HollywoodandFine.com Dear Will Smith, I read recently that you are involved in remaking Sam Peckinpah’s classic western, “The Wild Bunch.” So I’m writing this open letter, pleading with you to reconsider this unnecessary exercise. To my thinking, Peckinpah’s film is perhaps the greatest western ever made; a wider sampling of …
By Armond White From the actors’ perspective, Behind the Candelabra looks like a compassionate portrayal of the pianist and singer Liberace‘s relationship with Scott Thorson. The older established celebrity’s involvement with a younger man, masked for the public from 1977 to Liberace’s death in 1987, gets exposed here as an …
By Armond White Filmed under the working title “The Controversy,” Margarethe von Trotta’s bio-pic Hannah Arendt (now at Film Forum), about the renown German Jewish critic and philosopher, combines gossipy insight into the New York literary society of the 1960s with a more serious story of political morality. Those seemingly …
HollywoodandFine.com A movie that’s bound to set your paranoia sensors flashing, “The East” is a cerebral thriller in which it’s hard to tell who’s the hero and who’s the villain. That’s especially true for the film’s central character, a former FBI agent named Sarah, played by the film’s producer and …
HollywoodandFine.com “Fill the Void” is as interesting for the things it doesn’t do as for what it does. Written and directed by Rama Burshtein and set in the Hasidic community of Tel Aviv, it’s a story about family and a sense of duty, informed by a devout faith. The faith …
Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters “Before Midnight,” the third and richest collaboration between Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and director Richard Linklater, finds the French and American couple Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) still talking, talking, talking – and making love. Having met on a train nearly two decades …
Why won’t Linklater, Hawkes and Delpy shut up? By Armond White Following Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight’s ongoing chronicle of an aging, talkative, narcissistic couple Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (he’s author of two books This Time and That Time; she’s artistic) threatens to become the …
