HollywoodandFine.com I spent years as a critic waiting eagerly for the end of the year, when I could finally (and with great deliberation) craft my 10-best list of movies for the year. No longer. Ten-best lists are, I’m afraid, a dime a dozen. Everybody has their own – and anyone …
HollywoodandFine.com When you consider that Tom Cruise has been a major movie star for more than three decades, it’s surprising how few out-and-out stinkers he’s made (can Tom Hanks say the same thing?) and how much of himself he can still hold in reserve, with which to surprise us in …
HollywoodandFine.com This was originally going to be a piece about how wrong it was for Will Smith to remake “The Wild Bunch.” But that metastasized into an idea about remakes and reboots in general. So I wound up simply writing an open letter to Smith about “The Wild Bunch” – …
HollywoodandFine.com A couple of weeks ago, someone I know, after scanning the movie listings of a Friday newspaper (and really, I’m dating that person just by identifying them as an actual newspaper reader), asked me, “When will we get some good movies?” Without missing a beat, I said, “Maybe October.” …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s nothing wrong with “Jack Reacher” that couldn’t be helped by losing 15 or 20 minutes of exposition and other kinds of explaining. Sort of like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books: They’re long and involved but only sporadically interesting. Reacher himself spends far too much time on the kind …
HollywoodandFine.com “Ruby Sparks” could be a tasty bit of magical realism in romantic-comedy form, the first produced screenplay by actress Zoe Kazan, who plays the title character. Except for one serious problem. Directed by the “Little Miss Sunshine” team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, “Ruby Sparks” should be the …
HollywoodandFine.com You know a tent-pole movie series is in trouble when it has to explain its title in its dialogue. As in Tom Cruise saying, about midway through “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” to the rest of his crew, “We’re going to Ghost Protocol. Ghost Protocol is…” and then explaining …