Critics and casual moviegoers alike frequently complain of a lack of originality in the output of Hollywood and the broader film industry, the implication being that we see the same half-dozen stories rehashed over and over again. But what if the gratingly familiar nature of most new releases has less to do with story itself […]
Review: “To the Wonder” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. Even though there’s a $120 million-budgeted science-fiction blockbuster starring Tom Cruise, who either used to be or still is one of the world’s biggest movie stars (depending on who you talk to), being released, this
Box Office Beat: Weekend of April 19 Read More »
If we are to accept that “42,” a Hollywood-financed Jackie Robinson biopic, was going to be manipulative no matter the talent involved—which is to say, dramatized to the hilt, with constant reminders (swooning musical score, over-the-top dialogue) that the sociopolitical stakes of each scene are higher than Cheech and Chong—then this Brian Helgeland-directed film is
Critic Speak turns one year old today—how time flies—and in celebration we are launching our latest new feature on the site, the Critic Speak Podcast. I’ll host this weekly show (a new episode every Monday night) with my fellow Critic Speak editor/co-founder James Frazier. We’ll cover an array of topics related to current happenings in the
Critic Speak Podcast: Episode 1 Read More »
Didn’t the “Scary Movie” films used to be parodies? It has been 13 years since the first one came out, so my memory is admittedly a bit foggy, but I seem to remember the Wayans Brothers taking pointed jabs at “Scream,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Sixth Sense,” and other ‘90s horror staples. They made
Review: “Scary Movie 5” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. Apologies for my unannounced absence last week; I was out of town at my graduate school orientation, so I barely had time to choke out reviews of “The Croods” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,”
Box Office Beat: Weekend of April 12 Read More »
At the exact same time that “Evil Dead” first unspooled on over 3,000 screens across the country—last Thursday at 10 p.m.—NBC premiered another new spin on a horror staple, the series “Hannibal.” This was perhaps the most gruesome hour in the history of network television, complete with a murder re-enactment, the discovery of corpses, the
Review: “Evil Dead” Read More »
Derek Cianfrance’s sprawling, epic “The Place Beyond the Pines” is Capital-A Ambitious filmmaking of proportions we haven’t encountered in a project with Hollywood stars since “The Tree of Life” a few years back. Well, perhaps that’s an overstatement—Cianfrance’s focus is smaller than Terrence Malick’s, which amounted to no less than the breadth of Creation—but still,
Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines” Read More »
There is no doubt that DreamWorks has established itself as a film-brand nearly as recognizable as Pixar, but the value of such is debatable, given that the brand is essentially “The Big Animation Studio That Isn’t As Good as Pixar.” That’s not to say that the animators at DreamWorks don’t execute a good idea well
Review: “The Croods” Read More »
“G.I. Joe: Retaliation” has nary a single moment in its 110 minute runtime that doesn’t qualify as idiotic in some capacity. It’s yet another mega-budget film that serves as an assault on logic and realism, with each scene seemingly trying to top the previous one in terms of how ridiculous it can get. This process
Review: “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” Read More »
