HollywoodandFine.com Travis Fine’s “Any Day Now’ is set in the late 1970s, but, with its story about a gay couple battling to adopt an unwanted child, it could just as easily be set in the current day. It’s one of the few films being released Dec. 14 (in limited release), …
HollywoodandFine.com Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson” is half a good movie. When it focuses on the quirks and manipulations of international events, it crackles and pops – and when it turns its attention to the soap-operatic romance, it settles into a dull hum. Based on real events, Richard Nelson’s …
HollywoodandFine.com “Lay the Favorite” feels like it should be a better gambling movie – funnier, like “The Sting,” or more exciting like “The Cincinnati Kid.” But despite a cast that includes Rebecca Hall, Bruce Willis, Vince Vaughn and Catherine Zeta-Jones – and a director like Stephen Frears – “Lay the …
HollywoodandFine.com With baby boomers heading into retirement, there’s been a bull market on biographies and documentaries about baby-boomer rock-star heroes. There’s a sense of summing up, of valedictory in the recent pile-up of books and movies by and about Neil Young, David Geffin, the Rolling Stones, Pete Townsend and Rod …
HollywoodandFine.com While crime fiction with an edge of both menace and wit have become mainstays on TV, movies haven’t been able to consistently blend the two in recent years, with most attempts seeming either too hyperbolic and action-y or too self-consciously noir-y. Now comes “Killing Them Softly,” which may be …
HollywoodandFine.com The marvelous Scottish actor Robert Carlyle has been a fixture in films large and small for 20-plus years, but no one has written a part for him that gives him the chance to show his range the way Marshall Lewy has in “California Solo” (opening in limited release Friday, …
HollywoodandFine.com A fascinating fable about the meaning of both faith and fate, “Life of Pi” is a wonderfully visual telling of a Yann Martel’s best-selling and award-winning novel. Director Ang Lee raises the bar on digital imagery, even as he puts it in service to his story. He’s also one …
HollywoodandFine.com The visual trickery will catch your attention – but it’s the performance behind it that will hold you and move you in Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone,” opening Wednesday (11/21/12) in limited release. The director of the harrowing “Un Prophete” – with its gritty violence and interracial tensions in …
HollywoodandFine.com Pity poor Toby Jones. A few years ago, he got what he probably thought was the role of a lifetime, playing Truman Capote in “Infamous,” a movie about the writing of “In Cold Blood.” Then Philip Seymour Hoffman swooped in playing the title role in Bennett Miller’s “Capote,” winning …
HollywoodandFine.com The heart wants what the heart wants, as Woody Allen so famously said. That’s not news to the writers of tragic fiction. Misplaced affection – or the death of one love at the birth of another – is the bedrock of classic tales as diverse as “An American Tragedy” …