Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is not a good movie. It pains me to report this, as Ang Lee is a master storyteller and filmmaker, and I’ve been a fan of all of his films (yes, even Ride with the Devil, which is hugely underrated). However, nothing about this movie worked for me as a…
It seems nearly insane that this film was nominated for Best Picture in 1993, not because it’s not fully awesome, but rather, this genre would NEVER be paid attention to by members of the Academy in our current cinematic climate. Harrison Ford delivered a quintessential movie star performance, eliciting sympathy right from the outset, and…
Shoot ‘Em Up is a wildly silly R-rated cartoon of a movie, tremendously fun and berserk and made with low-budget zeal and ingenuity. Playing like a Looney Tunes adventure on a few hits of PCP, this is pure comic-book-movie shenanigans, but instead of superheroes from another galaxy, the characters in this oddly eccentric actioner bounce…
Currently streaming on Netflix and available on disc via The Criterion Collection, a piece of work that has come into full view after more than one screening. Shot on location all over Europe at a variety of obscenely photogenic locations by cinematographer Yorick Le Saux on 35mm film(!), Olivier Assayas’ dreamy film, which he wrote…
It’s a hard quality to have as a director, to make your films feel crazy and antic and wild, but at the same time still pay attention to mise-en-scene, performance, and technique. Rush’s 1970 effort Getting Straight is a wild beast, an anti-establishment picture made as one turbulent decade was ending and another socially questionable…
The Untouchables is a stone-cold classic. Brian De Palma’s bravura direction amounted to a clinic on how to make a supreme piece of studio funded entertainment, with showboating performances from a massive cast, all filtered through the elegant and stylized dialogue courtesy of David Mamet; his vulgar poetry really sets this one on fire. It’s…
The list of truly memorable hockey movies is short, but near the very top, and definitely sitting in the penalty box for excessive fisticuffs, is Goon, the raucous and extremely bloody 2011 comedy from director Michael Dowse (What If, Take Me Home Tonight) and writers Jay Baruchel (Man Seeking Woman) and Evan Goldberg (Pineapple Express,…
Sobering. Troubling. Shattering. The 2010 documentary Nostalgia for the Light hits with the blunt emotional force of a freight train, while also providing a glimpse into the cosmos that has rarely been seen. This revelatory and consummately constructed 90 minute film delves into one of the world’s great genocidal atrocities, and is startlingly unique in…
I’m picky when it comes to fantasy movies. Very picky. I’m not a fan of LOTR or any of its seemingly endless derivatives. But while not perfect, I’ve always had a HUGE soft spot for Rob Bowman’s Reign of Fire, which sports a genre-popping screenplay by Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka, and Matthew Greenberg that had…
The elegiac and introspective drama Jackie is not an attempt at a traditional biopic of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and it’s all the more poignant as a result. Taking a very specific route with its narrative and presenting the story during the incredibly sad and difficult days that immediately followed her husband’s assassination, Pablo Larrain’s smart…
I expected to be starving after watching The Founder, John Lee Hancock’s sneakily dark expose of the origins of McDonald’s but I was sorely mistaken . Robert D. Siegel’s swift screenplay effectively laid out the broad-stroke history to one of the world’s most popular franchise restaurants, never backpedaling on any of the ethically and morally…
Director Peter Berg had a banner year in 2016. He first released his disaster movie epic Deepwater Horizon in September, and most recently, his late December release, the Boston Marathon bombing drama has gone into nationwide expansion in the states with a worldwide release to follow. Tobias A. Schliessler’s outstanding and highly visceral…
Denzel Washington delivers a volcanic performance in his latest directorial effort, Fences, while the magnificent Viola Davis counters with her own blistering piece of internalized acting; the two artists literally explode off of the screen. Efficiently directed by Washington, the film was adapted for the screen by playwright August Wilson, whose original, Pulitzer-winning effort was…
White Bird in a Blizzard is something unique – a touching coming of age story, a tense and unpredictable whodunit with a dynamite final twist, a study of marital discord, and a time capsule back to the late 80’s, all of it filtered through some surrealistic touches and flights of fancy for good artistic measure….
Uninterested in being a straightforward biopic and all the more enjoyable because of that fact, Don Cheadle’s impressionistic and time-jumping portrait of iconic jazz artist Miles Davis, appropriately titled Miles Ahead (the title of his 1957 album), is a celebration of its subject while still presenting a warts and all narrative that focuses on the…
The Big Lebowski is a favorite comedy for so many people because it speaks to everyone’s inner “Dude,” and it balances various forms of comedy – physical, verbal, visual, spiritual, existential – in a way that few other films have successfully pulled off. This was the last movie I think anyone would have expected from…
