HollywoodandFine.com The first time a major feature film came out with this title, it was a 1963 entry by the late Ingmar Bergman – not exactly the Judd Apatow of the Swedes. Now here comes Swiss filmmaker Baran bo Odar with “The Silence,” a film about a serial killer in …
HollywoodandFine.com Though Ray Winstone has been a TV star in Great Britain since the mid-1970s, a lot of Americans got their first sighting of the beefy British actor with Gary Oldman’s 1997’s “Nil By Mouth” or 2000’s “Sexy Beast.” Since then, he’s created a small niche for himself in American …
HollywoodandFine.com By its nature, movies set aboard submarines should come with built-in suspense. If the story is set during a war, well, there’s always the threat of attack. Even during peacetime, submarines are tense settings: the claustrophobia factor, the ever-present possibility of mechanical failure, that whole trapped-at-the-bottom of the ocean …
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 …