HollywoodandFine.com Jonathan Demme’s “Ricki and the Flash” is one of those near-misses that feels as though a lot of discussion went into the rationale behind every wrong-headed decision. No doubt Demme (and screenwriter Diablo Cody) can explain why a failed singer playing in a bar band is someone we should …
HollywoodandFine.com Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” arrives on the big screen 27 years after it opened on Broadway – and with the same second-act problems that have plagued it through the years. Adapted to the screen by Rob Marshall (for whom his first feature, “Chicago,” may end up as the …
HollywoodandFine.com “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Tolstoy observed and he could have been talking about the Weston clan of “August: Osage County,” when he wrote that line to start “Anna Karenina.” This particular family get-together is like one of those “Royal Rumble” professional wrestling matches, where …
HollywoodandFine.com The commercials make “Hope Springs” look like some sort of mildly naughty sex comedy about an uptight older-middle-aged couple who rediscover the joys of sex through couples’ therapy. With Steve Carell – that wacky guy! – as the therapist. And the ads trumpet the fact that it’s from “the …
HollywoodandFine.com “To the Arctic,” like the cable series “Frozen Planet” and other films of the type, provides a precious historical record. At some point in the future, as man-made climate change raises global temperatures and causes the polar ice caps to melt even faster, we will no longer have species …
HollywoodandFine.com The focus isn’t even on her. We’re in a grungy British superette (as we used to call them in the Midwest) and some raucous music is playing loudly as an elderly woman shops for milk. It’s only because the camera turns its attention in her direction that we really …