HollywoodandFine.com “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Tolstoy observed and he could have been talking about the Weston clan of “August: Osage County,” when he wrote that line to start “Anna Karenina.” This particular family get-together is like one of those “Royal Rumble” professional wrestling matches, where …
HollywoodandFine.com A roiling visual extrusion rendered from computer-generated imagery, “Jack the Giant Slayer” makes you long for the days of Ray Harryhausen. With his sometimes jerky stop-motion animation that was state-of-the-art movie magic for decades, Harryhausen somehow convinced you more thoroughly that his characters were alive and had feelings and …
HollywoodandFine.com The annual 10-best list is a critical ritual, one I’ve been practicing for far too many years. Sure, I have opinions about what the best films of the past year are – and so does every other critic. If I think “Argo” should be on the list but not …
HollywoodandFine.com You don’t have to be a parent to appreciate the horror, the challenge and the determination involved in the story of “The Impossible” – or to be plunged into the mindset of “What would I have done?” But if you are, you’ll have an extra appreciation for what the …
HollywoodandFine.com Adapt and evolve – hey, it’s what we do. But when you get stuck in the rut of your life without realizing it, it’s nice to have someone unexpected come along and nudge you out of it. That, at least, is one of the lessons to take away from …
HollywoodandFine.com David Mackenzie’s “Perfect Sense” is an end-of-the-world romance in which the world disappears incrementally. Being involved in this velvet apocalypse is a little like being the Cheshire cat, unable to control which part of you will disappear next. Like Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” and Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness,” Mackenzie’s cataclysm comes …
HollywoodandFine.com I don’t know whether Gina Carano has a future as an actress but she certainly kicks ass in Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire,” a jet-propelled action-thriller that has little time for wasted motion. Working from a script by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote “The Limey,” Soderbergh has made an intense and …