HollywoodandFine.com David Mackenzie’s “Perfect Sense” is an end-of-the-world romance in which the world disappears incrementally. Being involved in this velvet apocalypse is a little like being the Cheshire cat, unable to control which part of you will disappear next. Like Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” and Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness,” Mackenzie’s cataclysm comes …
HollywoodandFine.com She’s a nonagenarian who, when dressed in black, looks a little like a bobble-head with a pipe-cleaner body. But, at the age of 91, entertainer Carol Channing has amazing energy and a rare spirit for life. As filmmaker Dori Berinstein shows in “Carol Channing: Larger than Life,” Channing is …
HollywoodandFine.com I have a hard time getting scared by horror films that deal in the supernatural. But a horror film such as “The Grey” has an easier time sinking its teeth into me. I’m too pragmatic to worry about the paranormal, I guess – but trapped in the Arctic wilderness, …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s been interesting to hear George Lucas complaining about the lack of attention being paid to the black-themed film from his production company, “Red Tails.” The conventional wisdom is that Lucas himself had to put his money and his influence behind the movie to get it made and released …
HollywoodandFine.com Dreams not only die hard – they’re trampled to death and then mocked, in Gerardo Naranjo’s nonstop nightmare, “Miss Bala.” The Mexican film, inexplicably left off the short list for the foreign-language feature Oscar, is a high-speed action tale, told through the eyes of a helpless victim of that …
HollywoodandFine.com I don’t know whether Gina Carano has a future as an actress but she certainly kicks ass in Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire,” a jet-propelled action-thriller that has little time for wasted motion. Working from a script by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote “The Limey,” Soderbergh has made an intense and …
HollywoodandFine.com Peter Facinelli looks a little like the young Tom Cruise: same slightly rabbity smile that radiates a sense of both supreme confidence and gnawing insecurity. Facinelli has a wider face with more prominent cheekbones but he has the same athletic physicality and a looseness that Cruise has lost. Forget …
HollywoodandFine.com In terms of creating moments that capture the excitement a live musical performance can arouse, Todd Graff knows his stuff. He showed it in 2003’s underrated “Camp,” in 2009’s disposable “Bandslam” – and he does it again in “Joyful Noise,” a movie with big, rousing soul-gospel songs that take …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve always loved animation – make that, good animation – and feel lucky that my kids were the perfect age when Disney had its second golden age of animation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My son was 4 when I took him to see 1991’s “Beauty and …
HollywoodandFine.com Think of “It’s About You” as the “Tree of Life” of rock-docs: a movie so in love with atmospherics and self-examination that it completely loses track of its subject. As rock documentaries go, “It’s About You,” ostensibly a film about John Mellencamp by photographer Kurt Markus and his son, …
HollywoodandFine.com One of the intriguing phenomena of the 2008 election was the fact that, while African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama for president, that surge of black voters at the polls in California was one of the factors in the passage of Proposition 8, which rendered same-sex marriage illegal in …
HollywoodandFine.com Family dynamics make for potent drama – and few films this year have used that idea to better effect than Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” which made my 10-best list for 2011. The drama stems less from head-to-head conflict – though that comes, eventually – but from subtler things. Truth …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s unusual to have Steven Spielberg competing with himself at the box office this holiday weekend, but there he is – with “The Adventures of Tintin” and now with “War Horse.” Based on the popular children’s book that inspired the Tony-winning Broadway production, “War Horse” is exactly what it …
HollywoodandFine.com Matt Damon has had a strong career playing hard-edged, serious guys like Jason Bourne or the title character in “Good Will Hunting.” So you forget his aptitude for comedy. He brought it to “30 Rock,” just as he did for the Farrelly brothers in “Stuck on You.” Still, I …