HollywoodandFine.com You could think of “Aftermath” as a Polish version of “12 Years a Slave”: a film that exhumes a shameful chapter in its nation’s history which some people would just as soon leave buried, rather than confront. Instead of slavery, however, “Aftermath” deals with Polish anti-semitism, as it was …
HollywoodandFine.com Pity the poor filmmaker who has to follow Alex Gibney in tackling any subject. Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian, has made a string of tough, incisive nonfiction films examining such topics as Enron, the Iraq war and beyond. His 2010 documentary about crooked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, “Casino Jack and …
HollywoodandFine.com Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme has built a whole side business making films that most other filmmakers would be happy to have as a career: documentaries about music and musicians. Boswell to Neil Young through three films, Demme has also made a film about Robyn Hitchcock – and now Italy’s cult …
HollywoodandFine.com Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” is the year’s most powerful film, an arthouse masterpiece which demands to be seen – and which will punch mainstream audiences in the gut. McQueen may be the most distinctive filmmaker to emerge since Quentin Tarantino. But while this film deals with similar …
HollywoodandFine.com Like bookends – or perhaps a double-feature for adrenaline junkies – “All Is Lost” comes on the heels of “Gravity” with the distaff and earthbound version of a similar story. But where Sandra Bullock barely stopped talking during “Gravity,” Robert Redford barely says a word in the course of …
HollywoodandFine.com Randy Moore’s “Escape from Tomorrow” may be the year’s most subversive film: a horrifying satire of the manufactured fun we’ve come to associate with the Disney assembly line. Make no mistake: I’m a huge fan of the shiny, witty entertainment which, for years, has been the Disney trademark. I …
HollywoodandFine.com Cult hits are exactly that for a reason. They’re movies that appeal to a small, feverishly loyal audience who, in most cases, love them either in spite of the fact that they’re terrible (“Rocky Horror Picture Show”) or because they’re terrible (“The Room”) – or perhaps a mixture of …
HollywoodandFine.com Apparently we’re going to have a bumper crop of outstanding thrillers this season – “Gravity,” the upcoming “All Is Lost” (well, not technically a thriller but still intense) – and now “Captain Phillips.” Where the first two are fiction, Pal Greengrass’ latest film finds him returning to a story …
HollywoodandFine.com When it happened in the spring of 2012, the Jeremy Lin phenomenon – commonly referred to as “Linsanity,” from which the new documentary takes its name – was startling for its prevalence. As Evan Leong’s new film shows, the excitement in New York was infectious. It spread worldwide – …
HollywoodandFine.com Fifty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “Parkland” still has the power to hit you like a fast-moving bus. A recreation of Nov. 22, 1963, as seen through the eyes of people who were directly involved, Peter Landesman’s film has the immediacy of a documentary, though it …