HollywoodandFine.com I spent years as a critic waiting eagerly for the end of the year, when I could finally (and with great deliberation) craft my 10-best list of movies for the year. No longer. Ten-best lists are, I’m afraid, a dime a dozen. Everybody has their own – and anyone …
HollywoodandFine.com I went into “This Is Where I Leave You” with trepidation, mostly having to do with its director, Shawn Levy. The man behind such standard-lowering hits as “Cheaper By the Dozen” and the “Night at the Museum” movies, Levy is the filmmaker version of that old saying: To a …
HollywoodandFine.com OK. I’ll admit it: My favorite film this week is also the most transgressive. It’s full of vicious one-liners that are guaranteed to offend, well, the easily offended. Jason Bateman makes his directing debut with “Bad Words,” the rudest comedy about an adult dealing with kids since “Bad Santa.” …
HollywoodandFine.com “Disconnect” is in the “Crash”/ “Nashville”/ “Short Cuts” school of story-telling, bringing together three disparate storylines that ultimately provide echoes and resonance between themselves, while involving people of tangential connection. But in Henry-Alex Rubin’s film, from Andrew Stern’s script, the connections – or the way they’re made – is …
HollywoodandFine.com Think of “Identity Thief” as a weak-tea reworking of “Midnight Run,” itself a long-overvalued action-comedy that was never as good its proponents would have you think. Here’s the most damning credit in the list of unremarkable credits for “Identity Thief”: The writer is Craig Mazin, whose filmography includes “Scary …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve got to hand it to Morgan Spurlock, a documentary maker who has enough curiosity – and enough wherewithal – to make the movies he wants to make, and lots of them. “Mansome” is his second this year (after his entertaining Comic-Con doc), a slight but entertaining piece that …