HollywoodandFine.com Michael Haneke has always been a little too bloodless as a filmmaker, for my taste. There is a distance – and a coldness – to his work, an almost clinical feel, like a scientist tracking the path of rats through a maze. He creates uncomfortable situations and lets them …
HollywoodandFine.com My heart sank when I heard that Peter Jackson, having already made the greatest fantasy trilogy of all time in “The Lord of the Rings,” was going back to the well once more, this time taking the reins of “The Hobbit” from Guillermo del Toro. And then that it …
HollywoodandFine.com Travis Fine’s “Any Day Now’ is set in the late 1970s, but, with its story about a gay couple battling to adopt an unwanted child, it could just as easily be set in the current day. It’s one of the few films being released Dec. 14 (in limited release), …
HollywoodandFine.com Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson” is half a good movie. When it focuses on the quirks and manipulations of international events, it crackles and pops – and when it turns its attention to the soap-operatic romance, it settles into a dull hum. Based on real events, Richard Nelson’s …
HollywoodandFine.com “Lay the Favorite” feels like it should be a better gambling movie – funnier, like “The Sting,” or more exciting like “The Cincinnati Kid.” But despite a cast that includes Rebecca Hall, Bruce Willis, Vince Vaughn and Catherine Zeta-Jones – and a director like Stephen Frears – “Lay the …
Kathryn Bigelow’s war drama Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was named Best Picture from this year’s vote. The film also won two other awards for Best Director (Bigelow) and Best Cinematographer (Greig Fraser). Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Lincoln, picked up three awards, including Best Actor …
HollywoodandFine.com With baby boomers heading into retirement, there’s been a bull market on biographies and documentaries about baby-boomer rock-star heroes. There’s a sense of summing up, of valedictory in the recent pile-up of books and movies by and about Neil Young, David Geffin, the Rolling Stones, Pete Townsend and Rod …
HollywoodandFine.com While crime fiction with an edge of both menace and wit have become mainstays on TV, movies haven’t been able to consistently blend the two in recent years, with most attempts seeming either too hyperbolic and action-y or too self-consciously noir-y. Now comes “Killing Them Softly,” which may be …
Universal’s surprisingly satisfying celebration of its 100th anniversary with a robust slate of classic Blu-ray releases — unlike Paramount, which has outsourced most of its back catalogue — unfortunately did not extend to any films starring Deanna Durbin, who as a teenager in the late 1930s rescued the film from …
The only screen teaming of screen legends Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn is finally making its US TV debut on Turner Classic Movies on Thursday, 46 years after “The Iron Petticoat’’ opened in theaters. Unavailable in the country for decades because of a long-ago public feud between Hope and the …
HollywoodandFine.com The marvelous Scottish actor Robert Carlyle has been a fixture in films large and small for 20-plus years, but no one has written a part for him that gives him the chance to show his range the way Marshall Lewy has in “California Solo” (opening in limited release Friday, …
HollywoodandFine.com John Milius’ “Red Dawn,” released in 1984, was a simplistic, militaristic rabble-rouser of a film, a Reagan-era Cold War relic that offered lots of rah-rah about how mighty the United States fighting spirit was, even when its military was taken out of the picture. It looked silly and dated …
HollywoodandFine.com A fascinating fable about the meaning of both faith and fate, “Life of Pi” is a wonderfully visual telling of a Yann Martel’s best-selling and award-winning novel. Director Ang Lee raises the bar on digital imagery, even as he puts it in service to his story. He’s also one …
The TCM Vault Collection, which celebrates its fourth anniversary next month, scores a coup with today’s first-ever U.S. video release in any format of “The Iron Petticoat” (1956), a film so hard to see it’s never even been shown on TV in this country (a situation TCM, which has licensed …