HollywoodandFine.com “The Prey” is one of those high-energy suspense thrillers that the French seem to toss off effortlessly – then sit back helplessly as Americans muck up the remake. I dare you to watch this film and not spend the second half recasting it in your mind with American stars. …
HollywoodandFine.com “The Purge” is a high-concept blunt instrument of a thriller, a movie that offers a straightforward set-up and few subsequent surprises. It does exactly what you expect and doesn’t really go anywhere you don’t assume it will. The premise is devilishly simple: In the future, the government has eliminated …
HollywoodandFine.com I want to applaud Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing” for all the things it does right, and I will. But Whedon’s side project – between his various TV and Marvel-related entertainments – gets one thing unfortunately wrong: It’s never very funny. Much of that has to do with …
HollywoodandFine.com Shown at Sundance under the title “Toy’s House,” Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ “The Kings of Summer” is a coming-of-age tale that touches a lot of bases and explores a variety of tones in ways that most films are too timid to do. Based on a witty, imaginative script by Chris Galletta, …
HollywoodandFine.com A movie that’s bound to set your paranoia sensors flashing, “The East” is a cerebral thriller in which it’s hard to tell who’s the hero and who’s the villain. That’s especially true for the film’s central character, a former FBI agent named Sarah, played by the film’s producer and …
HollywoodandFine.com Anyone who’s been married for any length of time should be able to enjoy Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” if squirming in your seat can be considered a form of enjoyment. The third in a trilogy that began with “Before Sunrise” (1995) and continued with “Before Sunset’ (2004), this film …
HollywoodandFine.com Other documentarians may be more famous than Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, but there’s no one working right now who afflicts the comfortable with more energy and pointedness than Gibney. “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks” is Gibney’s second documentary in less than a year, after the upsetting and revealing …
HollywoodandFine.com I often note how difficult it is to create a comedy that’s not only smart and funny but also charming and surprising. But first-time director Craig Zisk, a TV veteran, has done that with “The English Teacher,” which opens in limited release today (5/17/13). Like a witty update on …
HollywoodandFine.com Having broken through as a filmmaker with the intriguing and moving “The Freebie,” actress Katie Aselton suffers the sophomore slump with her second film as a director, “Black Rock.” Written by her husband, Mark Duplass, “Black Rock” is meant to be a “Deliverance”-style thriller, a girls-vs.-boys tale set on …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve mostly been a fan of the films of Noah Baumbach but, with “Frances Ha,” he loses me. Never a filmmaker for whom story seemed particularly important, Baumbach collaborated here with his star, Greta Gerwig, for what feels like an amorphous and fragmentary story of a delusional young woman …