HollywoodandFine.com Randy Moore’s “Escape from Tomorrow” may be the year’s most subversive film: a horrifying satire of the manufactured fun we’ve come to associate with the Disney assembly line. Make no mistake: I’m a huge fan of the shiny, witty entertainment which, for years, has been the Disney trademark. I …
HollywoodandFine.com Cult hits are exactly that for a reason. They’re movies that appeal to a small, feverishly loyal audience who, in most cases, love them either in spite of the fact that they’re terrible (“Rocky Horror Picture Show”) or because they’re terrible (“The Room”) – or perhaps a mixture of …
HollywoodandFine.com Apparently we’re going to have a bumper crop of outstanding thrillers this season – “Gravity,” the upcoming “All Is Lost” (well, not technically a thriller but still intense) – and now “Captain Phillips.” Where the first two are fiction, Pal Greengrass’ latest film finds him returning to a story …
HollywoodandFine.com When it happened in the spring of 2012, the Jeremy Lin phenomenon – commonly referred to as “Linsanity,” from which the new documentary takes its name – was startling for its prevalence. As Evan Leong’s new film shows, the excitement in New York was infectious. It spread worldwide – …
HollywoodandFine.com Fifty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “Parkland” still has the power to hit you like a fast-moving bus. A recreation of Nov. 22, 1963, as seen through the eyes of people who were directly involved, Peter Landesman’s film has the immediacy of a documentary, though it …
HollywoodandFine.com Paul Giamatti is one of our great screen actors, an absolute poet of frustration and regret with the range to play a wide variety of roles. Watch him in Tom McCarthy’s delightful “Win Win” and then in “Cold Souls” and then in “American Splendor.” He can play everything from …
HollywoodandFine.com Not since “127 Hours” have I run into a movie that provoked that mixture of excitement and trepidation in people I know who have seen the trailer as “Gravity.” The excitement is understandable. The trailers make it look like exactly what it is, which is a harrowing, white-knuckle tale …
HollywoodandFine.com Some actors attract you because of their openness: What you see is what you get, in all its honesty and candor. But other actors pull you in with their mystery: They present a face that seems to offer any number of interpretations. You don’t quite know what they’re thinking …
HollywoodandFine.com Either the title of the documentary “Muscle Shoals” resonates with you – in which case it resonates hard – or you have no idea what it means. But you should – or you should find out by watching the movie, one of the year’s most entertaining and enriching nonfiction …
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 …