HollywoodandFine.com “Quartet” marks Dustin Hoffman’s official debut as a film director, though he was originally slated to direct the 1978 cult hit, “Straight Time” (and, by some accounts, actually did). Hoffman is one of the seminal film figures of the 1960s and 1970s, part of a group (including Al Pacino …
HollywoodandFine.com I wanted to like “Promised Land” and certainly agree with its politics. So why did it feel like a preaching-to-the-converted letdown? Written by costars Matt Damon and John Krasinski, this Gus Van Sant film deals with a small Pennsylvania town hit hard by the recession. The area farmers are …
HollywoodandFine.com Tom Hooper’s film of the musical “Les Miserables” is an exceptional movie of a mediocre musical, the kind of middlebrow melodrama that passes for profound on Broadway. Part of the sorry big-box-musical era that brought us “Cats,” “Miss Saigon” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Les Miserables” was a …
HollywoodandFine.com At this point in his career, is there anything Quentin Tarantino can do to surprise us? Absolutely. I was floored by 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds” – not by the violence or the outrageousness of some of the action, but by Tarantino’s command of suspense, his ability to crank the tension …
HollywoodandFine.com You don’t have to be a parent to appreciate the horror, the challenge and the determination involved in the story of “The Impossible” – or to be plunged into the mindset of “What would I have done?” But if you are, you’ll have an extra appreciation for what the …
HollywoodandFine.com Foul-mouthed without being particularly funny, involved without being compelling, Judd Apatow’s “This Is 40” wants to be deeper than it really is. Which is an Apatowian trademark. Apatow aspires to be a contemporary Frank Capra – albeit one with fart and blowjob jokes. But his movies are always about …
HollywoodandFine.com David Chase’s “Not Fade Away” is one of my favorite films of 2012, a heartfelt but clear-eyed look at what it’s like to be a teen-ager who falls in love with rock’n’roll. More accurately, it examines what it felt like to be a teen in 1963, when the Beatles …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s nothing wrong with “Jack Reacher” that couldn’t be helped by losing 15 or 20 minutes of exposition and other kinds of explaining. Sort of like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books: They’re long and involved but only sporadically interesting. Reacher himself spends far too much time on the kind …
HollywoodandFine.com You’ve no doubt heard about a little movie called “Zero Dark Thirty,” which suddenly is the controversial odds-on Oscar favorite. The controversy has to do with a couple of scenes of torture – or “harsh interrogation techniques,” as the Orwellian Bush-era new-speak had it. They occur early in the …
HollywoodandFine.com An icon of the baby-boom generation, Barbra Streisand teams up with the free-spirited shlub-star of the Millenials, Seth Rogen, in “The Guilt Trip,” a movie whose wit is never as sharp as its heart is warm. For a comedy with heart, this film by Anne Fletcher is unfortunately short …
HollywoodandFine.com Michael Haneke has always been a little too bloodless as a filmmaker, for my taste. There is a distance – and a coldness – to his work, an almost clinical feel, like a scientist tracking the path of rats through a maze. He creates uncomfortable situations and lets them …
HollywoodandFine.com My heart sank when I heard that Peter Jackson, having already made the greatest fantasy trilogy of all time in “The Lord of the Rings,” was going back to the well once more, this time taking the reins of “The Hobbit” from Guillermo del Toro. And then that it …
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 …