At his recent Republican National Convention speech, actor Clint Eastwood first addressed the crowd by saying, “I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, what’s a movie tradesman doing out here? You know they are all left-wingers out there, left of Lenin. At least that is what people think. That is not really the case. There are […]
Review: “Last Ounce of Courage” Read More »
Despite sharing a similarly whimsical spirit with their first feature, “Persepolis,” “Chicken with Plums” is not the follow-up that one would expect from filmmakers Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, though perhaps it signals that they will build their entire career around unexpected marriages of subject and aesthetic. “Persepolis” used simple, hand-drawn, black-and-white animation to bring
Review: “Chicken with Plums” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office grosses. Well, except for last weekend’s, that is — can you believe that after writing this column for 17 weekends in a row, it completely slipped my mind? It’s hard to blame me, really, given how
Box Office Beat: Weekend of September 14 Read More »
It is a testament to the gimmick-free execution of “Robot & Frank” that one of the first adjectives that come to mind when discussing the film is not “quirky.” After all, the premise–in the near future, a former cat burglar (Frank Langella) battling dementia uses his helper robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) to steal jewelry
Review: “Robot & Frank” Read More »
“The Words” is a story within a story within a story, and only one of these offers anything that resembles a conclusion. Given writer/directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal’s apparent love of plot–what other Hollywood filmmakers have recently implemented a three-layered structure?–the movie’s abrupt, mildly confusing ending seems auspicious at first. But upon reflection, it
Review: “The Words” Read More »
This weekend was the weakest for the domestic box office in recent memory, with the supernatural horror film “The Possession” topping the chart for a second weekend in a row despite not cracking $10 million. The new openers all tanked — the multi-narrative non-romance “The Words” made just $4.8 million and the Bruce Willis-Henry Cavill
Weekend Box Office: “The Possession” once again tops very weak crop Read More »
Contemporary political films, especially those made in the United States, tend to overindulge in on-the-nose partisan messaging. Director Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator” and “Lions for Lambs,” for instance, housed admirable statements about the corrosion of American politics, but Redford undermined these with a zealot’s sledgehammer. This is why Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s more nuanced approach
Streaming Pick: “Tony Manero” (2008) Read More »
While the historical-fiction narrative of Daniel Lee’s “White Vengeance” may prove illuminating for Chinese viewers who are already familiar with the history of the Qin Dynasty, particularly the Hongmen Banquet event in 206 B.C., it’s safe to say that nearly every foreign viewer will be lost by the half-hour mark. Only the gist of the
Blu-Ray Review: “White Vengeance” Read More »
It was only a couple months ago that we learned that Richard Linklater, July Delpy, and Ethan Hawke were officially planning a follow-up to “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” and a couple weeks ago that we learned that the trio were scouting locations in Greece. Well, now comes news that they have not just started
Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke have already wrapped shooting on “Before Midnight” Read More »
David Koepp’s “Premium Rush” is as meat-and-potatoes as action pictures get, though such a masculine descriptor seems ill-fitted for a movie about a guy who uses a bicycle, not a muscle car, as his main method of transportation. That said, Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is manlier than your average tights-donning, butt-waving weekend cyclist; he sports plain
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