HollywoodandFine.com As you get older, it’s easy to forget that age when every moment of life seemed fraught with all possible feelings at the most dramatic levels. Life and death seemed to hang in the balance with each step you took, each encounter you had, each moment you spent, each …
HollywoodandFine.com OK, here’s a promise: No jokes or puns based on the title of “Dredd 3D.” Fish in a barrel and all that. Not that there’s much that’s memorable about Pete Travis’ reboot of a moribund movie franchise based on what is, by now, sort of a classic comic book. …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s a Chekhovian truism that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it had better go off before the end of the play. That apparently didn’t register with David Ayer, who wrote and directed “End of Watch,” a competent but unremarkable new cops-on-the-streets tale starring Jake Gyllenhaal …
HollywoodandFine.com Think of “Trouble with the Curve” as the anti-“Moneyball”: a movie that dismisses Billy Bean and Bill James’ data-centric approach to quantifying baseball talent, in favor of old-fashioned gut instinct. It’s also a clichéd and sentimental dramedy, in which the comedy is wan and the drama telegraphs itself like …
HollywoodandFine.com Quietly and unobtrusively, actor Josh Radnor is building himself a filmography of solidly made, unobtrusively sly and intelligent comedy. With 2010’s “Happythankyoumoreplease” (which had its flaws but also its pleasures) and now with “Liberal Arts” (open in limited release), Radnor proves that he knows a thing or two about …
HollywoodandFine.com It used to be that Disney would rerelease its old animated features on a regular schedule into theaters, reaching a new audience every decade or so with sure-fire quality entertainment that made parents cheer and kept kids entertained. That equation was upset with the rise of home video – …
HollywoodandFine.com “Family – it’s what really matters,” says Robert Miller (Richard Gere), or words to that effect, to a gathering in his posh Fifth Avenue townhouse that includes his wife (Susan Sarandon), grown children, grandchildren and friends, who have assembled to celebrate his 60th birthday. So, in Nicholas Jarecki’s entertaining, …
HollywoodandFine.com Casually brutal, drily (but only intermittently) funny and frequently just plain strange, the German “Snowman’s Land” is a gloomy comedy that’s funnier in theory than in practice. Walter (Jurgen Rissman) is a hired killer who kills the wrong man by mistake – and so is banished by his boss, …
HollywoodandFine.com Stories within stories – “The Words” sometimes threatens to swallow itself whole. The fact that it doesn’t is a tribute to writer-directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, whose intriguing script uses each of its plotlines to resonate with and reflect the others. The film starts with Dennis Quaid, as …
HollywoodandFine.com Ira Sachs’ “Keep the Lights On” starts with a credit montage of bad paintings. The fact that they’re all homoerotic in content has nothing to do with their quality, which is amateurish. His protagonist, Erik (Thure Lindhardt), is first seen cruising gay-sex phone chatlines looking for company. He finds …