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 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 I lost count of the number of noggins that were perforated by hot lead in “Bullet to the Head,” but it was more than a dozen. Henchman apparently is a particularly dangerous job description, at least in this movie, though they’re not the only ones who wind up with …
HollywoodandFine.com I found myself strangely compelled by Austin Chick’s “Girls Against Boys,” as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. The film starts with a flash-forward, with a young woman named Lu (Nicole LaLiberte), sexually teasing a cop (Matthew Rauch) in a bedroom, then getting him …
HollywoodandFine.com The waste of talent in Fisher Stevens’ “Stand Up Guys” is criminal. It’s the movie equivalent of shooting a man in Reno, just to watch him die. This tale of three aging lawbreakers – played by Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin – is not just clichéd. It’s …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s the rare political satire that really works – if only because real politics are so much weirder and painfully amusing than anything a writer could concoct. Exhibit A: Mark Sanford, disgraced governor of South Carolina, announcing he will run for Congress (where he’ll fit right in). If finding …
HollywoodandFine.com Based on a cult novel by David Wong, Don Coscarelli’s “John Dies at the End” suffers the same problem as its source book: an elaborate imagination in service to writing that is never anywhere near as funny or clever as the writer seems to believe. As a result, this …
HollywoodandFine.com Sheldon Candis’ “LUV” is a rough coming-of-age tale that establishes Common as a rapper who could easily put his music career behind him and concentrate on acting. It also introduces a young talent, Michael Rainey Jr., as his nephew, in a breakthrough role that theoretically could signal the start …
HollywoodandFine.com Allen Hughes’ “Broken City” has the bones and perhaps even the DNA of a better, darker and more interesting film. Its tale of marital discord and political in-fighting, as well as corruption and malfeasance, could have been constructed as one of those painfully compelling tales of a good man …
HollywoodandFine.com Sometimes, all you want is a knock-down, guns-blazing approximation of an old-style western, even if it’s set in contemporary times. As a modern oater, “The Last Stand” is shamelessly entertaining. As guilty pleasures go, this one is relatively defensible. Directed by Korean émigré Kim Jee-woon, it’s a 21st-century take …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s taken me a while to get around to it, but I wanted to offer a nod of approval for Walter Salles’ “On the Road,” which came out in limited release at the end of 2012. Dismissed by some critics for being too vague in its storytelling, Salles’ film …
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 …