HollywoodandFine.com Amusing and slight, “What We Do in the Shadows” is a mockumentary drawn from the same sensibilities that produced “Flight of the Conchords,” “Eagle v. Shark” and “Boy,” among others. Written and directed by the team of Jemaine Clement and Taiki Watiti, this film presents a flock (coven? pride? …
HollywoodandFine.com Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” arrives on the big screen 27 years after it opened on Broadway – and with the same second-act problems that have plagued it through the years. Adapted to the screen by Rob Marshall (for whom his first feature, “Chicago,” may end up as the …
HollywoodandFine.com Everyone, at some point, wonders how they would react to a split-second emergency. Fight or flight? Leap into action or race for the exit? Or simply crumble? That’s the question at the center of the wickedly chilly “Force Majeure,” a movie about a momentary decision that may lead to …
HollywoodandFine.com After I saw “22 Jump Street,” I noted publicly that, while it was funnier than “21 Jump Street,” so was my root canal. (Although the latter did include laughing gas.) Still, the bar wasn’t particularly high. So why is this film currently floating atop the Rotten Tomatoes chart with …
HollywoodandFine.com If you’re keeping score at home, of the three Marvel comic-book movies so far this summer (a term I use advisedly for a season that technically doesn’t start for another month), “X-Men: Days of Future Past” outranks “Amazing Spider-Man 2” and is about on a par with “Captain America: …
HollywoodandFine.com Hirokazu Koreeda’s “Like Father, Like Son” is a delicate but daunting tale, one whose quietly self-contained story manages to churn great waves of emotional complexity. The set-up is a popular literary and cinematic plot contrivance: the switched-at-birth trope. But it is acted out in movingly stark relief in this …
HollywoodandFine.com When my oldest son was a tot, one of the videotapes in heavy rotation on our TV was the cartoon feature, “The Land Before Time.” In it, a group of baby dinosaurs – a brontosaurus, triceratops and a couple of others – get separated from their herd during the …
HollywoodandFine.com Ahhh yes, the zombie apocalypse – that moment when the dead rise and, by biting the living, turn them into zombies as well. Some theorize that Patient Zero was Ronald Reagan. Before long, there’s an unorganized zombie army meandering around the streets, chomping on any unfortunate warm-blooded soul who …
HollywoodandFine.com Let’s see if we can go through this entire review without making any puns or other kind of wordplay about magic as we discuss “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.” Seek elsewhere if you require jokes about the vanishing laughs and mystifying mediocrity of this film. The two big Steves – …
HollywoodandFine.com Jonathan Levine’s “Warm Bodies” won the weekend box-office race for a couple of reasons. It’s a romantic comedy that works, for one thing. For another, it’s a smart reworking of “Romeo and Juliet.” And, finally, it takes the zombie genre someplace it hasn’t been before – though, at this …
HollywoodandFine.com You get the feeling that Ruben Fleischer would have been happy to make an homage to the gangster movies of the 1940s (filtered through both a 1970s and a 21st-century perspective) when he was making “Gangster Squad.” That’s not the same thing, unfortunately, as making a derivative and slight …
HollywoodandFine.com The marvelous Scottish actor Robert Carlyle has been a fixture in films large and small for 20-plus years, but no one has written a part for him that gives him the chance to show his range the way Marshall Lewy has in “California Solo” (opening in limited release Friday, …
HollywoodandFine.com It seems like an innocuous title – until you realize (or learn) that “The Manzanar Fishing Club,” a new documentary by Cory Shiozaki opening today in limited release, deals with one of this country’s most shameful chapters: the internment of Japanese citizens after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Shiozaki’s …
HollywoodandFine.com The first “Wallander” novels by Henning Mankell were published in Sweden in the early 1990s. There have been Wallander movies and TV series in Sweden, as well as a British adaptation with Kenneth Branagh as the depressed detective Kurt Wallander that played in the U.S. on “Masterpiece: Mystery.” But …