HollywoodandFine.com As allegories go, Juan Diego Solanas’ “Upside Down” is about as deep as that famous Frank Gorshin “Star Trek” episode – we’re talking classic “Star Trek,” mind you. In the episode, titled “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” the Enterprise picks up two aliens whose faces are split down …
HollywoodandFine.com Let’s see if we can go through this entire review without making any puns or other kind of wordplay about magic as we discuss “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.” Seek elsewhere if you require jokes about the vanishing laughs and mystifying mediocrity of this film. The two big Steves – …
HollywoodandFine.com No one will ever accuse me of being a fan of Harmony Korine’s films. But I was surprised by his newest, “Spring Breakers” (opening in limited release Friday 3/15/13), which seems like a “Girls Gone Wild” video with automatic weapons, but is actually a bit deeper (and even creepier) …
HollywoodandFine.com Philip Roth may be our greatest living writer. So why would he give himself over to filmmakers who would make a movie as dull, superficial and pedantic as “Philip Roth: Unmasked”? The film, which receives a special theatrical run starting this week at Film Forum in New York, will …
HollywoodandFine.com The history books won’t tell you the story of U.S. Marine Gen. Bonner Fellers that you see in “Emperor.” Which is just as well because Fellers’ real story is more chaotic and less overtly heroic than the character portrayed by Matthew Fox in Peter Webber’s new film. Fox is …
HollywoodandFine.com Though Ray Winstone has been a TV star in Great Britain since the mid-1970s, a lot of Americans got their first sighting of the beefy British actor with Gary Oldman’s 1997’s “Nil By Mouth” or 2000’s “Sexy Beast.” Since then, he’s created a small niche for himself in American …
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 Chan-wook Park’s “Stoker” is audaciously, in-your-face creepy and exhilarating in a way few films have been since David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Because it’s not just the creepiness – but the way Park gets you involved in his world so that you can’t look away. Written by Wentworth Miller (yeah, …
HollywoodandFine.com You watch a documentary like “A Place At the Table” and it makes you wonder about all the people who still regard large swaths of the population as takers. The thinking is that these people aren’t able to support themselves and their families because they don’t want to. They’d …
HollywoodandFine.com There are a number of people whose work I admire involved with “Inescapable.” So allow me to say some nice things about them before I talk about what is so wrong with this movie. The film is written and directed by Ruba Nadda, a Canadian director of Middle Eastern …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s rare that a filmmaker has more than one film out in a single year, unless they’re either making both features and documentaries – or they’re Steven Soderbergh. But Alex Karpovsky actually has two films out the same day: “Red Flag” and “Rubberneck.” They’re being released as a double-feature …
HollywoodandFine.com According to box-office pundits, “A Good Day to Die Hard” (on further reference: “Die Hard 5”) will be the big box-office winner this holiday weekend. It will reassert Bruce Willis’ box-office magnetism. And it will do it while kicking dirt on the aspirations of his two vintage rivals, Sylvester …
HollywoodandFine.com Her name is Lore (pronounced like Laura) and, from all appearances, she’s your typical petulant 14-year-old, focused on herself, with little time for her gaggle of siblings or her parents. But then reality sets in: Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) is an adolescent in 1945 Germany. The war is coming to …
HollywoodandFine.com Jonathan Levine’s “Warm Bodies” won the weekend box-office race for a couple of reasons. It’s a romantic comedy that works, for one thing. For another, it’s a smart reworking of “Romeo and Juliet.” And, finally, it takes the zombie genre someplace it hasn’t been before – though, at this …