Given the media storm surrounding Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station,” which has linked the events depicted in the film to those of the recent Trayvon Martin case, you might be surprised to learn that the film doesn’t explicitly take the position that its subject, Oscar Grant, was killed because of his race. In fact, Coogler doesn’t […]
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“Blue Jasmine” is a type of Woody Allen film that Allen hasn’t made in over a decade: a dramedy that’s more drama than comedy, but isn’t heavily concerned with plot. Perhaps even more than 2011’s “Midnight in Paris,” the movie feels like “vintage Allen,” though I use that term with some level of trepidation because
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“Blackfish” is the latest addition to the recent wave of activist documentaries that exist exclusively to promote awareness of and involvement in their cause. You won’t find much rhetorical nuance or discourse with the opposing side here, but such tactics don’t spawn headlines, which is clearly what director Gabriela Cowperthwaite and her subjects saw a
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It’s ironic that the creator of “Saw,” the first film in the defining franchise of the “torture porn” movement that represents everything that’s wrong with contemporary horror filmmaking, would go on to become Hollywood’s leading director of old-fashioned ghost stories that overtly reject current genre trends, but such has been the fascinating career path of
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“Pacific Rim” belongs in a better summer for movies. At a time when virtually every would-be blockbuster release is a dreary franchise entry, when what were once dazzling special effects have been whittled down into the mundane, “Pacific Rim” does something enthralling. Here we have a movie heavily inspired by existing material but not a
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The title “A Hijacking” is rather misleading. The titular event is not depicted in the film; writer/director Tobias Lindholm only shows us the lead-up to and aftermath of Somali pirates taking a Danish freighter hostage, rejecting every opportunity to turn the film into the kind of basic action-thriller that the title suggests. Lindholm works toward
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For a biopic that tries to sell us on the complexity of its subject’s political theories, Margarethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” is awfully simplistic. Centered around Ms. Arendt’s unconventional “New Yorker” coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial, the film provides a bullet-points version of her work as an intellectual during the late ’50s and early
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With a skeletal narrative and more tepid one-off gags than you can count, “Despicable Me 2” would be indistinguishable from your average Nickelodeon cartoon episode if not for its $76 million budget, A-list voice cast, and hour-and-a-half running time. The first two components of that list are saving graces—at least the images are top-of-the-line and
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Neil Jordan’s “Byzantium,” the filmmaker’s first return to vampires since 1994’s massive Cruise-Pitt success “Interview with the Vampire,” is the best kind of genre film, which is to say the kind of genre film that makes you forget it’s a genre film. Yes, we’ve encountered variations of this story onscreen dozens of times before, but
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Stephen Walker and Sally George’s 2007 documentary “Young @ Heart,” about a chorus of Massachusetts senior citizens who perform pop covers, was so genuinely moving and respectful of its subjects that I suppose it was just a matter of time before a fiction filmmaker hijacked the premise for a manipulative, cloying feature. That’s exactly what
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