HollywoodandFine.com Sex is a magnetic force, one that attracts and repels with equal force. Those impulses can be electrifying or awkward, drawing us desperately while tripping us up regularly. To make it even more difficult, this primal bit of attraction comes freighted with teachings about morality, religion and hygiene. Now …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ll admit I’m a sucker for Martin McDonagh’s work. I’m a fan of his plays and loved his first feature, “In Bruges.” And I’m just as excited about his new film, “Seven Psychopaths,” perhaps the movie that forces you to laugh at more inappropriate moments than any film in …
HollywoodandFine.com The best films about recovery from addiction are not about reaching rock bottom and making that choice to stop. Rather, like “Smashed,” they’re about the very real and difficult task of going on, in an emotionally unshielded and intensely vulnerable way. Addiction, after all, isn’t about loving the substance …
HollywoodandFine.com Quiet but compelling, emotionally buttoned-up and naked at the same time, Ava DuVernay’s “Middle of Nowhere,” opening in limited release Friday (10/12/12), is a film about holding still while trying to move forward. It’s not an easy trick; indeed, it’s impossible. Which is what the film’s central character, Ruby …
HollywoodandFine.com How much bad luck can one family have? Enough for a hit movie – “Taken” – and what I assume the makers hope is a hit sequel: “Taken 2.” “Taken” starred Liam Neeson as Brian Mills, a security expert and former special-ops guy whose daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) is …
HollywoodandFine.com I’m not one who worships at the altar of Tim Burton, probably disliking his films as often as I am moved by them. For every effort as emotionally rich as “Sweeney Todd,” there’s something as flat and wankish as “Dark Shadows.” But I fell hard for “Frankenweenie,” an extrapolation …
HollywoodandFine.com Would “Butter” be a funnier movie if Michele Bachmann were still at the center of the American political conversation? Of course not. Bachmann is her own perpetual punchline, more extreme and ridiculous than any satirist’s imagination. If you wrote her as a character, she would be unbelievable. Her truth …
HollywoodandFine.com Lee Daniels received all sorts of accolades for 2009’s “Precious,” which seemed to announce a fiery new filmmaking talent. But the real indicator of Daniels’ sensibility may actually be 2005’s “Shadowboxer,” an overwrought and preposterous tale of professional killers (Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr.) who also happen to …
HollywoodandFine.com Rian Johnson went dark noir via teen angst in his breakout film, “Brick,” then got all Wes Anderson in “The Brothers Bloom.” Now, with “Looper,” he thinks big – or, at least, bigger, going futuristic sci-fi. But he treats the material as a crime-fiction saga, rather than a special-effects …
HollywoodandFine.com As you get older, it’s easy to forget that age when every moment of life seemed fraught with all possible feelings at the most dramatic levels. Life and death seemed to hang in the balance with each step you took, each encounter you had, each moment you spent, each …
HollywoodandFine.com OK, here’s a promise: No jokes or puns based on the title of “Dredd 3D.” Fish in a barrel and all that. Not that there’s much that’s memorable about Pete Travis’ reboot of a moribund movie franchise based on what is, by now, sort of a classic comic book. …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s a Chekhovian truism that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it had better go off before the end of the play. That apparently didn’t register with David Ayer, who wrote and directed “End of Watch,” a competent but unremarkable new cops-on-the-streets tale starring Jake Gyllenhaal …
HollywoodandFine.com Think of “Trouble with the Curve” as the anti-“Moneyball”: a movie that dismisses Billy Bean and Bill James’ data-centric approach to quantifying baseball talent, in favor of old-fashioned gut instinct. It’s also a clichéd and sentimental dramedy, in which the comedy is wan and the drama telegraphs itself like …
HollywoodandFine.com Quietly and unobtrusively, actor Josh Radnor is building himself a filmography of solidly made, unobtrusively sly and intelligent comedy. With 2010’s “Happythankyoumoreplease” (which had its flaws but also its pleasures) and now with “Liberal Arts” (open in limited release), Radnor proves that he knows a thing or two about …