I like THE HUNGER GAMES: series, and the second installment, CATCHING FIRE--despite a colleague's calling it "a long slog"--absolutely held me. Once again, the charismatic Jennifer Lawrence as the reluctant firebrand Katniss Everdeen continues to rebel against the capitol. Having out-witted the powers that be in the first Hunger Games--a TV spectacle in which children [...]
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR has certainly heated up the conversation about women, sex on film, and madmen directors. Since the NC-17 rated movie along with its leading ladies (a first!) won the Palme d'Or the highest honor at this year's Cannes Film Festival, arguments have erupted, accusations have been hurled, and tears have been [...]
THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN opens on a tight shot of a group of down-home, country bluegrass musicians performing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." They may be "down home"--but not in the country you think. Though their English sounds flawless, they are actually Flemish musicians in Ghent 2006. And that American country classic they're singing? It's [...]
ALL IS LOST--Robert Redford's latest as a man alone and adrift at sea-- plays like an extended Viagra commercial. You know-- older, handsome outdoorsman testing his mettle against the elements; there's a broken mast involved. I know, I know. It's Redford--and there's already Oscar buzz about this performance and this movie. Well, I know what [...]
12 YEARS A SLAVE is as unsparing as its title. The film is a shattering experience-- for actors and audience--as we are dragged into the abyss of slavery through the documented real life experience of a free black man in upstate NY who was kidnapped from his family in the middle of his life, and [...]
I have just seen the first OSCAR WORTHY performance by an actress this year-- or any year: Cate Blanchett in BLUE JASMINE--Woody's latest and absolutely one of his best films, ever. It's become a cliche that writer/director Woody Allen's work had hit the doldrums critically for a bit, and lately, everything he's doing has been [...]
Steve Jobs would have HATED this movie. Where Jobs the man was a revolutionary thinker outside the box, JOBS the movie is a swamp of cliches. Where Jobs the man was a detailed and exacting mass of conundrums, JOBS the film is a hodgepodge of carelessly assembled factoids, loose ends, facile conclusions, and haphazard montages. [...]
I've yet to see THE WOLVERINE and believe I am the LONE CRITIC who loved THE LONE RANGER. Here's the best & worst of the rest so far: 20 FEET FROM STARDOM--This revealing, heartbreaking documentary charts the careers, hopes, dreams, disappointments of the back-up singers who literally stand inches away from center stage-the voices behind [...]
Now THIS excites me. THE WOLF OF WALL STREET due out this November!
It's great-- once it stops. The first frantic 45 minutes of filmmaker Baz ("Moulin Rouge") Luhrman's eye-popping, screen swollen, 3D, musical mashup of F. Scott Fitzgerald's mythic novel brought me to the brink of motion sickness. Then it settled down, and the dramatic interplay of these iconic characters, against the deeper backdrop of the American [...]
