HollywoodandFine.com The conventional wisdom about the “Star Trek” movies starring the cast of the original TV show was that the even-numbered films were the good ones and the odd-numbered ones kind of sucked. That began to change when the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” movies kicked in; most of them …
HollywoodandFine.com Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is one of the year’s best films: funny, moving, thought-provoking – and so personal that it strikes universal chords. While critics often score indulgent filmmakers by referring to their efforts as “home movies,” Polley has turned that insult on its head. She takes her …
HollywoodandFine.com At the point when it actually starts to rain blood near the end of the remake of “Evil Dead,” you would think that things couldn’t get any gorier. And of course you’d be wrong. You’ve got to say this for filmmaker Fede Alvarez: He knows how to bring the …
HollywoodandFine.com Neither terrible nor revelatory, Ramaa Mosley’s “The Brass Teapot” is the kind of movie you might stumble across on cable and stick with, if only because, well, you’ve got nothing better to do. Like W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Brass Teapot” is a slight tale with a dark …
HollywoodandFine.com The darling of the Australian Academy Awards and a hit on the festival circuit, “The Sapphires” is that pure treat: an aggressively entertaining movie about the struggle, uplift, romance and joy of music. Based on a true story, it touches on the deep-seated racism in Australia that kept its …
HollywoodandFine.com The first time a major feature film came out with this title, it was a 1963 entry by the late Ingmar Bergman – not exactly the Judd Apatow of the Swedes. Now here comes Swiss filmmaker Baran bo Odar with “The Silence,” a film about a serial killer in …
HollywoodandFine.com By its nature, movies set aboard submarines should come with built-in suspense. If the story is set during a war, well, there’s always the threat of attack. Even during peacetime, submarines are tense settings: the claustrophobia factor, the ever-present possibility of mechanical failure, that whole trapped-at-the-bottom of the ocean …
HollywoodandFine.com In “Snitch,” Dwayne Johnson – still probably better known as The Rock – plays a normal guy pressed into action to help save his son from a 10-year stretch in prison because of the mandatory-minimum sentencing drug laws in Missouri, where the film is set. And that injustice – …
HollywoodandFine.com I’m probably the wrong demographic for “Beautiful Creatures,” the latest effort at franchise-building in the teen supernatural-romance genre. Based on the first in a series of books by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, “Beautiful Creatures” (opening Thursday) hopes the “Twihards” can shift their focus from the undead to the …
HollywoodandFine.com Think of “Identity Thief” as a weak-tea reworking of “Midnight Run,” itself a long-overvalued action-comedy that was never as good its proponents would have you think. Here’s the most damning credit in the list of unremarkable credits for “Identity Thief”: The writer is Craig Mazin, whose filmography includes “Scary …