HollywoodandFine.com Anyone who’s been married for any length of time should be able to enjoy Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” if squirming in your seat can be considered a form of enjoyment. The third in a trilogy that began with “Before Sunrise” (1995) and continued with “Before Sunset’ (2004), this film …
HollywoodandFine.com Other documentarians may be more famous than Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, but there’s no one working right now who afflicts the comfortable with more energy and pointedness than Gibney. “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks” is Gibney’s second documentary in less than a year, after the upsetting and revealing …
HollywoodandFine.com I often note how difficult it is to create a comedy that’s not only smart and funny but also charming and surprising. But first-time director Craig Zisk, a TV veteran, has done that with “The English Teacher,” which opens in limited release today (5/17/13). Like a witty update on …
HollywoodandFine.com Having broken through as a filmmaker with the intriguing and moving “The Freebie,” actress Katie Aselton suffers the sophomore slump with her second film as a director, “Black Rock.” Written by her husband, Mark Duplass, “Black Rock” is meant to be a “Deliverance”-style thriller, a girls-vs.-boys tale set on …
HollywoodandFine.com South Korean cinema has exploded internationally in the past decade or so. I won’t speculate about how South Korean society informs the consciousness of its filmmakers because, well, we probably only see a fraction of the output. It would be like basing your opinions of American culture on the …
HollywoodandFine.com The conventional wisdom about the “Star Trek” movies starring the cast of the original TV show was that the even-numbered films were the good ones and the odd-numbered ones kind of sucked. That began to change when the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” movies kicked in; most of them …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve mostly been a fan of the films of Noah Baumbach but, with “Frances Ha,” he loses me. Never a filmmaker for whom story seemed particularly important, Baumbach collaborated here with his star, Greta Gerwig, for what feels like an amorphous and fragmentary story of a delusional young woman …
HollywoodandFine.com Having made his name with the kind of horror films that inspired the term “torture-porn,” producer-writer Eli Roth tries to show that there are other tricks up his sleeve with “Aftershock.” Think of it as a 1970s’ disaster movie, spiked with 21st-century horror effects. Irwin Allen meets Robert Rodriguez. …
HollywoodandFine.com Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is one of the year’s best films: funny, moving, thought-provoking – and so personal that it strikes universal chords. While critics often score indulgent filmmakers by referring to their efforts as “home movies,” Polley has turned that insult on its head. She takes her …
HollywoodandFine.com You probably have to be in the right mood to appreciate “Sightseers” – a mood that involves dark thoughts, perseverance and a grisly sense of humor. If you ever imagine gruesome deaths befalling people who annoy you in the course of your day – people you may not even …