HollywoodandFine.com Here’s my first problem with Michael Mann’s “Blackhat”: Chris Hemsworth doesn’t have the talent to make me believe he’s smart enough to be an MIT-educated, world-class computer hacker. As I watched him, I kept wondering what a real actor – Mark Ruffalo or Edward Norton, say – would have …
HollywoodandFine.com Kenneth Branagh’s “Thor” had a certain playfulness that pitted the ultra-serious world of Asgard, land of the Norse gods, against 21st-century USA. Now director Alan Taylor has taken the reins of the franchise and, with “Thor: The Dark World,” drains the fun from it. Instead, he focuses on this …
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 …
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 …
By Armond White Why should we be watching commercials director Rupert Sanders’ film Snow White and the Huntsman when Romain Gavras’ No Church in the Wild music video for Kanye West begs our attention? Whatever unrest Kanye artfully evokes with Gavras’ references to insurrection and political strife is truer to …
HollywoodandFine.com For a movie based on a fairy tale, “Snow White and the Huntsman” is kind of grim – or is that Grimm? The year’s second movie based on the tale of Snow White and the Wicked Queen, it’s a much more serious film than “Mirror Mirror,” which tried to …
HollywoodandFine.com If you think you’ve seen “The Cabin in the Woods” before, well, you’re half-right. You’ve definitely seen movies along the same lines. But I’d also wager that you’ve never seen anything like it. Directed by Drew Goddard from a script by Goddard and Joss Whedon, “The Cabin in the …