HollywoodandFine.com It’s the rare teen-ager who can see beyond tomorrow. While they may worry about the future, they tend to live in the moment because, among other things, they feel immortal and most have little evidence to the contrary. Certainly that’s the case with Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), the high-school …
HollywoodandFine.com Whatever else you may say about “The Wolverine,” the latest Marvel comic-book adventure to reach the big screen, say this: It takes guts – and, apparently, both a big movie star and a popular hero – to get Hollywood to spend a bundle on a tentpole movie the bulk …
HollywoodandFine.com Approaching the age of 80, with more than 40 feature films under his belt, Woody Allen continues to astonish, finding new ways to surprise audiences with each year’s film. With “Blue Jasmine,” he shows once again that he is a master of texture and tone – of creating complex, …
HollywoodandFine.com One of those movies that worked much better than it deserved to, 2010’s “Red” offered action that was smart, funny and well-cast enough to make you forget just how ordinary it really was. Unfortunately, its sequel, “Red 2” is a movie of a very different and unwelcome type: the …
HollywoodandFine.com Everything that I loved about Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film, “Drive,” all the things that I found immediate and evocative – those are all the things that struck me as wrong-headed, self-indulgent and pretentious in his newest, already much-vilified “Only God Forgives.” Working once again with a nearly silent …
HollywoodandFine.com The older I get, the less interested I am in horror films, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the modern horror film has evolved into a choice between torture porn (violent and grisly for its own sake) and special-effects extravaganzas. Most of the horror I see (or …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s been four years since “The Cove” – and 20 years since “Free Willy.” And yet, as the upsetting new documentary, “Blackfish,” shows, man’s inhumanity to mammals continues unabated – as commercialized and heartless as ever, even when it includes collateral damage. That’s the story of “Blackfish,” a controversial …
HollywoodandFine.com I know people for whom watching Michael Cera act in anything is akin to nails on a blackboard – or even bamboo splinters under those fingernails. He’s the contraindication of an enjoyable film. For me, “Crystal Fairy” is further proof that Cera has a lot more range (and daring) …
HollywoodandFine.com Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station” arrives in theaters as this year’s independent film to beat when it comes to year-end awards. Quiet, stirring, enraging and sometimes quite funny, Coogler’s film, which took the two top prizes at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a snapshot of the dialectic of race …
HollywoodandFine.com In some ways, movies are about our childhood: about the dreams, fantasies, fears and hopes we saw reflected from our own lives on a big screen when we were at an impressionable age. So how much you enjoy Guillermo del Toro’s sprawling, exciting and exceptionally imaginative “Pacific Rim” may …
HollywoodandFine.com For years, I’ve read about the so-called “Black List” of screenplays: allegedly great scripts which, for some reason, Hollywood ignores because it would rather make dumb crap like “The Lone Ranger.” Then I see a movie like “Killing Season,” written by Evan Daugherty, a script billed as one of …
HollywoodandFine.com “Olympus Has Fallen” seemed like a front-runner to top year-end lists as one of 2013’s worst films. While it’s early enough in the year for another film to overtake it in the downhill race, it’s surprising to have that film be the second movie about a terrorist takeover of …
HollywoodandFine.com It always seems niggardly to refer to a Pixar film as a great animated comedy. “Animated” seems almost like a pejorative; at a minimum, it seems to diminish the accomplishment of a comedy because, well, aren’t all cartoons funny? Of course not – you don’t need to be a …
HollywoodandFine.com “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” Noel Coward wrote in his play, “Private Lives.” It certainly makes a difference in Paul Andrew Williams’ “Unfinished Song,” a so-so old-age dramedy that mostly avoids easy laughs but isn’t afraid to use sentimentality to pound its point home. The film is part …