Unlikable characters are difficult to get right, because their personalities inherently repel the viewer. So when a movie features a protagonist that is, on paper, entirely unlikable, what is a filmmaker to do? The answer: hire a great actor to make the character so believable that the audience finds truth in them, even if they […]
Review: “Arbitrage” Read More »
The 64th annual Emmy Awards were held last night in Los Angeles and, as expected, the big winners in the major categories were Showtime’s newcomer drama “Homeland” and ABC’s beloved returning comedy “Modern Family.” If you didn’t catch the show–and hopefully you didn’t, as it was a complete and utter snooze, with the exception of
List of 2012 Emmy winners Read More »
“End of Watch” is a superlative cop film by way of the war movie. That’s not an exaggeration, as its two protagonists, beat officers in the worst part of Los Angeles, patrol an area that seems just about as foreign and violent to most Americans as Afghanistan. The movie departs from the cop genre of
Review: “End of Watch” Read More »
As I predicted in this week’s Box Office Beat, Open Road’s cop film “End of Watch” did much better than most prognosticators expected, with receipts of $13m, and took the top slot on the chart for the weekend. It technically tied for first with Relativity’s horror-film-in-marketing-only (as our Timothy Semenza called it), “House at the
Weekend Box Office: “End of Watch” takes #1 Read More »
Horror movies are notorious magnets for unruly audience members. The common wisdom is that this is because they are generally made for the demographics most likely to disrupt the viewing experience with loud chatter, bright cell phone screens, and/or overly mobile children. But perhaps it is more a sign of the quality of the movies
Review: “House at the End of the Street” Read More »
The bulk of films about white, upper-middle-class, suburban malaise in America–most notably Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty”–are paradoxical in that they explore internalized suffering through externalized, emotive storytelling, wherein even a blank stare comes charged with the assumption of dramatic suffering taking place underneath it. This is a form borrowed from the Douglas Sirk melodramas of
Review: “Hello I Must Be Going” Read More »
In a year from now, “You May Not Kiss the Bride” will make for decent background noise when it inevitably airs on Lifetime, the channel that you only happen upon on lazy Sunday mornings when you’re nursing a hangover with Bisquick pancakes. Yes, I mean Bisquick pancakes specifically, because anyone with enough intellect to pick
Review: “You May Not Kiss the Bride” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office grosses. There are a whopping five new wide releases, which will make it especially pathetic if not one bucks the ongoing trend of box office duds. Last weekend, “Resident Evil: Retribution” and “Finding Nemo 3-D” didn’t
Box Office Beat: Weekend of September 21 Read More »
“Compliance” is an intentionally maddening, excruciatingly tense thriller that posits a notion I can’t totally agree with. Its story, which sees the morality of ordinary, law-abiding citizens wither under the instruction of a purported authority figure, suggests that nearly anyone is susceptible to following vile, outrageous orders if only they’re told to. Certainly, this is
Review: “Compliance” Read More »
In “Trouble with the Curve,” Clint Eastwood and Amy Adams play father and daughter Gus and Mickey Lobel — cartoon character-esque names that were undoubtedly created by screenwriter Randy Brown under the presumption that if he were to pick plainer ones, the viewer would instantly forget them and think of the duo not as characters, but
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