HollywoodandFine.com The waste of talent in Fisher Stevens’ “Stand Up Guys” is criminal. It’s the movie equivalent of shooting a man in Reno, just to watch him die. This tale of three aging lawbreakers – played by Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin – is not just clichéd. It’s …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s the rare political satire that really works – if only because real politics are so much weirder and painfully amusing than anything a writer could concoct. Exhibit A: Mark Sanford, disgraced governor of South Carolina, announcing he will run for Congress (where he’ll fit right in). If finding …
HollywoodandFine.com Based on a cult novel by David Wong, Don Coscarelli’s “John Dies at the End” suffers the same problem as its source book: an elaborate imagination in service to writing that is never anywhere near as funny or clever as the writer seems to believe. As a result, this …
HollywoodandFine.com Sheldon Candis’ “LUV” is a rough coming-of-age tale that establishes Common as a rapper who could easily put his music career behind him and concentrate on acting. It also introduces a young talent, Michael Rainey Jr., as his nephew, in a breakthrough role that theoretically could signal the start …
HollywoodandFine.com Allen Hughes’ “Broken City” has the bones and perhaps even the DNA of a better, darker and more interesting film. Its tale of marital discord and political in-fighting, as well as corruption and malfeasance, could have been constructed as one of those painfully compelling tales of a good man …
HollywoodandFine.com Sometimes, all you want is a knock-down, guns-blazing approximation of an old-style western, even if it’s set in contemporary times. As a modern oater, “The Last Stand” is shamelessly entertaining. As guilty pleasures go, this one is relatively defensible. Directed by Korean émigré Kim Jee-woon, it’s a 21st-century take …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s taken me a while to get around to it, but I wanted to offer a nod of approval for Walter Salles’ “On the Road,” which came out in limited release at the end of 2012. Dismissed by some critics for being too vague in its storytelling, Salles’ film …
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 Here’s a radical proposal: Let’s ban guns from being shown in movies and television. But not for the reasons you think. I’m not suggesting this because real handguns and automatic weapons are a threat to humans everywhere, though that is true. Nor is it because the casual, often comedic …
HollywoodandFine.com “Quartet” marks Dustin Hoffman’s official debut as a film director, though he was originally slated to direct the 1978 cult hit, “Straight Time” (and, by some accounts, actually did). Hoffman is one of the seminal film figures of the 1960s and 1970s, part of a group (including Al Pacino …