Recent films rely on one convention. It’s sad but almost every Hollywood film is about character redemption. We love seeing someone with a problem they must overcome. We love going from liking them to loving them and we get catharsis from the sunset that brings everything together in the end. What makes Young Adult such […]
It would be very easy to hate Carnage, Roman Polanski’s simple but searing adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning play The God of Carnage (or, Le Dieu du Carnage, really). The characters are so dreadful, so maddening, so obnoxiously self righteous that I wanted to hurl things at the screen. But about halfway through, I finally […]
The biggest problem with The Grey, Liam Neeson’s new movie about fighting wolves in the Alaskan wilderness, is simple, really. It’s the fact that you just walked into a movie theater expecting to see Liam Neeson fight wolves in the Alaskan wilderness – you’re ready to watch Neeson take out our lupine brethren using the […]
The Academy Awards are always a hotly debated item. Nominees are frequently the result of campaigning, elbow rubbing, and politicking. That being said, I decided to go against the grain to nominate the films I think deserved everyone’s attention. Also the ones I thought were awful. I tried to delve into the movies that stuck […]
I recently saw Ralph Fiennes’s labor of love—his adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—and I fully loved it. The movie is beautiful, gritty, unadorned, and truly unique in its interpretations of the characters and the play. It’s also a real war movie, with things to say about human nature, politics, and violence. Fiennes directed and stars […]
Haywire, the recently released directorial effort by Steven Soderbergh which Jason nicely reviewed here, also marks the first starring role for Mixed Martial Arts fighter, Gina Carano. As anyone who’s seen the film can attest, Carano is a certified badass. She made the erst-while Magneto, Michael Fassbender, look like a little boy in way over […]
Few modern directors have the skill and precision to nail both large budget genre film and tiny indie projects. Steven Soderbergh embodies the concept of versatility with his second released film in under a year, Haywire. With his twenty-fifth film in twenty-two years Soderbergh branches out from his norm to the world of high action […]
In a lot of ways, the new Disney policy of re-releasing classic films (like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast) in 3D can be seen as a cynical cash grab. After all, it essentially tricks people into paying $16.00 a pop to see a movie they probably already own on VHS, DVD and […]