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 […]
Review: “Premium Rush” Read More »
There is very little to say about the four-day holiday weekend box office, which saw two openers do relatively well, but not remarkably–“The Possession” with $21.3m and “Lawless” with $13.0m–and nearly every holdover play to expectation. The one exception was the conservative documentary “2016: Obama’s America,” which grossed a surprisingly strong $7.1m, signaling that viewers
Labor Day Weekend Box Office: “The Possession” tops down frame Read More »
As wildly fantastical versions of the world featuring kung-fu pandas, dueling monsters and aliens, and talking insects have become the primary domain of the children’s film, the more grounded magic realist fable has all but faded into oblivion. Only the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki still regularly indulges the style, and even his work has
Review: “The Odd Life of Timothy Green” Read More »
Anyone who thinks Michael Bay makes the biggest, loudest movies on Earth should watch the new Hong Kong film “The Viral Factor,” which may not have had the budget for giant Transformers, but nonetheless puts Bay to shame in terms of the amount of sustained action. The movie lacks a single ounce of subtlety or
Blu-Ray Review: “The Viral Factor” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office grosses. With each passing week in August, this piece has become progressively less exciting to write because the movies are total non-events. Only the surprise success of the conservative documentary “2016: Obama’s America” was able to
Box Office Beat: Weekend of August 31 Read More »
If you’re an adult, you probably haven’t yet heard of the Oogieloves — a Teletubbie-esque troupe of creature-things that star in a movie that opened in over 2,100 theaters yesterday. And if you hadn’t clicked onto this blog post, you probably never would have, either. The total opening day box office for “The Oogieloves in
“Lawless,” an ultra-violent gangster tale by John Hillcoat (“The Proposition,” “The Road”), is a textbook example of why the final act of a film is its most important. Movies that start off poorly have the potential to rebound, gaining the audience’s trust and respect with future developments. The ones with weak midsections can often be
As has been widely reported, the beloved action director Tony Scott committed suicide last week by jumping off of a bridge in Los Angeles. We here at Critic Speak thought that we would take a moment to share our favorite Scott films… Danny Baldwin – “Domino” (2005) It would be difficult to argue that Tony
Our favorite Tony Scott films Read More »
Stay tuned later today for more tributes to the life and work of Tony Scott from the rest of the Critic Speak team. It would be difficult to argue that Tony Scott’s “Domino” is his best work by any objective measure–it’s the kind of filmmaking that values messy passion over technical precision–but it’s my personal
Streaming Pick: “Domino” (2005) Read More »
The surprise is a lost art in contemporary cinema. Further, when new films actually manage to pull off unpredictable twists and turns–see Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”–they tend to sacrifice relatable characters to better service their plot tricks. Stanley Donen’s 1963 film “Charade,” on the other hand, is both unpredictable and emotionally resonant. The dynamic between the
Streaming Pick: “Charade” (1963) Read More »
