HollywoodandFine.com A roiling visual extrusion rendered from computer-generated imagery, “Jack the Giant Slayer” makes you long for the days of Ray Harryhausen. With his sometimes jerky stop-motion animation that was state-of-the-art movie magic for decades, Harryhausen somehow convinced you more thoroughly that his characters were alive and had feelings and …
HollywoodandFine.com Chan-wook Park’s “Stoker” is audaciously, in-your-face creepy and exhilarating in a way few films have been since David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Because it’s not just the creepiness – but the way Park gets you involved in his world so that you can’t look away. Written by Wentworth Miller (yeah, …
HollywoodandFine.com You watch a documentary like “A Place At the Table” and it makes you wonder about all the people who still regard large swaths of the population as takers. The thinking is that these people aren’t able to support themselves and their families because they don’t want to. They’d …
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 There are a number of people whose work I admire involved with “Inescapable.” So allow me to say some nice things about them before I talk about what is so wrong with this movie. The film is written and directed by Ruba Nadda, a Canadian director of Middle Eastern …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s rare that a filmmaker has more than one film out in a single year, unless they’re either making both features and documentaries – or they’re Steven Soderbergh. But Alex Karpovsky actually has two films out the same day: “Red Flag” and “Rubberneck.” They’re being released as a double-feature …
HollywoodandFine.com According to box-office pundits, “A Good Day to Die Hard” (on further reference: “Die Hard 5”) will be the big box-office winner this holiday weekend. It will reassert Bruce Willis’ box-office magnetism. And it will do it while kicking dirt on the aspirations of his two vintage rivals, Sylvester …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s been a lot of Oscar chatter about the fact that “Argo” seems on track to win the best-picture trophy this year – despite the fact that its director, Ben Affleck, was left off the list of best-director nominees. What seems to have gone undiscussed is the elephant in …
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 Her name is Lore (pronounced like Laura) and, from all appearances, she’s your typical petulant 14-year-old, focused on herself, with little time for her gaggle of siblings or her parents. But then reality sets in: Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) is an adolescent in 1945 Germany. The war is coming to …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com I have, on occasion, posted rants about filmmakers and actors who I consider overrated, a list that includes John Hughes, Terrence Malick, Zooey Deschanel and Ridley Scott, among others. And, at some point, a reader sent in a comment that said, “Why not write about someone who’s underrated?” To …
HollywoodandFine.com Dear Steven Soderbergh: Please don’t stop making movies. Your name is high on the list of filmmakers whose careers I’m thankful have coincided with my career as a movie critic. And “Side Effects” is further proof that you are at the height of your powers as a filmmaker. There’s …
HollywoodandFine.com Jonathan Levine’s “Warm Bodies” won the weekend box-office race for a couple of reasons. It’s a romantic comedy that works, for one thing. For another, it’s a smart reworking of “Romeo and Juliet.” And, finally, it takes the zombie genre someplace it hasn’t been before – though, at this …