With found footage movies on life support, writer and director David Ayer hopes to reanimate the genre with his first-person buddy cop action film, End of Watch. Having written Training Day, Mr. Ayer certainly had the street credentials for the job, but his flashy and ornate homage to the television show Cops, the original forbearer […]
If you’re going to see Nicholas Jarecki’s high finance thriller, Arbitrage, make sure to bring an Economics major with you. For one, he or she could tell you what ‘arbitrage’ means and how it applies to the film, and, for two, they can help you follow the serpentine and occasionally muddled script. Unlike 2011’s Margin […]
Ruby Sparks was my most anticipated movie of the summer and it was the first time in a long while that I went in with high expectations and had them surpassed. Zoe Kazan’s script is touching, and unique, but it’s also brimmingly hilarious. And she and Paul Dano are hilarious in it. As directed by […]
I’m sure you didn’t walk into the first Expendables expecting anything too serious and I can truthfully declare that you shouldn’t expect anything deeper or more meaningful than that when checking out the star studded sequel. With the same all-star action film line up from the first film along with some killer new additions, The […]
Post-Avengers, there have been a pile of movies I’ve been excited to see and only one of them has exceeded expectations. Magic Mike wasn’t what I was expecting, Brave annoyed me, and I was largely disappointed in The Dark Knight Rises– just for a few examples. But the one movie I saw on absolute instinct […]
Oliver Stone’s Savages is his best work in years. Or so the poster says. Given the slump Stone has been in since 2004’s epic failure Alexander, that’s not saying much. The film has been adapted from a book with the same name. I have not read the book and seeing the film did not encourage me […]
I was really looking forward to Magic Mike. I used to think Channing Tatum was a bit of an oaf, but I started to come around when The Vow proved he can sell a love story, and I was fully on board after he knocked 21 Jump Street out of the comedic park. After that, […]
When I was a kid, my first superhero love was Spiderman. In his cartoon incarnation, he was a wise-cracking, semi-nerdy photographer who just seemed to stumble into crime fighting. He was good-hearted and goofy, and he earned his super powers by supplementing with scientific curiosity and goodwill. When Sam Raimi’s version of the character came […]