HollywoodandFine.com Feel-good movies about people with mental disorders – from “As Good As It Gets” to “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” and beyond – face the same challenge. They have to take the psychological issues they deal with – depression, OCD, bipolar disorder – seriously enough to avoid trivializing …
HollywoodandFine.com It has been years – at least since Zoe Cassavetes’ underseen “Broken English” and perhaps since she burst on to the scene in the early 1990s – since Parker Posey has had a role as meaty and perfect for her as Susan Felders in Michael Walker’s “Price Check.” Walker’s …
HollywoodandFine.com Enlightenment, as we learned this week, is a two-way street. Or, as Dorothy Parker once said, you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think. Lest you think that we are living in a unique period in history – with half the country believing in angels but …
HollywoodandFine.com “Starlet,” opening Friday (11/9/12) in limited release, may be one of the year’s most surprising little movies, a tough-minded, low-budget tale that never quite leads you where it seems to be going. Not that where it’s going is somewhere you’d choose for yourself. But writer-director Sean Baker hooks you …
HollywoodandFine.com Don’t know much about history – but you don’t have to in order to be captivated by Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” Instead of making a conventional biopic, Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner chose to use a single month of Lincoln’s presidency – January, 1865 – to examine the character, power …
HollywoodandFine.com You’re as old as you feel – unless you’re James Bond. Then you’re both ageless and timeless. But as “Skyfall,” the newest adventure of 007, shows, even the world’s most dangerous secret agent needs to keep up with the times. And so director Sam Mendes and a trio of …
HollywoodandFine.com There are pleasures to be had from Yaron Zilberman’s “A Late Quartet,” opening in limited release today (11/2/12), principally having to do with its treatment of group dynamics battling artistic temperaments. The question is whether those are sufficient to warrant sitting through the rest of it. Set in the …
HollywoodandFine.com The commercials for “Flight” are a dazzling bit of bait-and-switch. If you’ve seen them, then your impression of the film is probably something along the lines of: A pilot saves an airliner from a seemingly certain crash, then must fight for his reputation against dark forces that want to …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve often said that the most influential films of the past 25 years were “Pulp Fiction” and “The Matrix,” two movies that have been copied endlessly by filmmakers who had nary a clue as to what these films were actually doing. It’s a list to which I’d also add …
HollywoodandFine.com “Fun Size” is no fun at any size. A limp teen comedy about teens searching for both a party and a lost child, “Fun Size” has fewer laughs than a half-hour of the average Nickelodeon sitcom – and that’s pretty damn few. Which makes sense because it’s a Nickelodeon …