Please, for his own good, somebody clap Dustin Hoffman into a chastity belt. Based on what Al Pacino suffers in Stand Up Guys and the identical humiliations visited up Robert De Niro in Little Fockers, it seems Hollywood will not be satisfied until it has speared a hypodermic into the…
“It’s hard to get these things started,” says Walter Hill, dean of the American action movie, speaking from Los Angeles. “Action films are by their very nature more expensive than what are sometimes called, in the independent world, ‘relationship films.’ But I despise these categories. I’ve never made a movie…
Being a lucky guy, I’ve been kicked in the balls only once. How did it rate on the comedy scale? Well, it was funnier than a monologue by Chelsea Handler but not quite as hilarious as my last screening for colorectal cancer. Yet despite the fact that this act hurts…
In movies and TV, Alex Karpovsky is only playing an asshole The coffee shop in New York’s Union Square might be packed on this cold afternoon, but scanning the crowded bar it’s hard to miss Alex Karpovsky looming at the far end — even if you’re not familiar with work…
Hollywood hasn’t butchered Parker — which is to say that it has let him remain a butcher. The protagonist of a series of thrillers by the author Donald Westlake, writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Parker the man is the supreme predator in the criminal jungle. Based on Flashfire, the…
Steven Spielberg and his jaunty little apologue about the 16th President of the United States aside, it’s no longer enough in movies for an historical figure or literary character to do simple stuff like abolish slavery or find a man of intelligence and character. Abraham Lincoln is reduced to slaying…
Two things are certain in life. One is that death will come for every one of us. The other is that every film Michael Haneke makes will have a fair shot at the Cannes Palme d’Or. Amour, Haneke’s much-garlanded latest, is set almost entirely within a well-appointed Paris apartment, amid…
Two sacred texts of the ’50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which probably would have worked only if starring Salinger himself, and the other is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings…
There’s traffic from Silver Lake. That’s why Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund, the stars of On the Road, are late to the Benedict Room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. We’re as psychically far from Jack Kerouac’s Beat gospel as you can get: fidgeting under crystal chandeliers in…
In George A. Romero’s deeply silly 1993 Stephen King adaptation The Dark Half, Timothy Hutton stars as Thad Beaumont, a writer whose highbrow pretensions don’t pay the bills. When Thad needs to make a quick buck, then, he seals himself into his study and grinds out a nihilistic thriller to…
You could hear a pin drop during the first Sundance screening of writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale, an enormously powerful and moving debut feature based on the shooting death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by Oakland transit police in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2009. Coogler opens the film–one of…
Sometimes, one film in a festival lineup can help to reveal another in sharper relief. To wit, one of the loveliest entries in Sundance 2013’s U.S. Dramatic Competition, James Ponsoldt’s deeply felt coming-of-age drama The Spectacular Now, looked even better after the premiere of The Way Way Back, a deeply…
Bold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color — a lyric reverie on loss, love, and various invasions of the body — was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let’s say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less heady…
“Hyde Park On Hudson”: It’s Patriotic to Pleasure a President
Bill Murray as FDR Almost Enough to Save “Hyde Park on Hudson”
We’re now a generation removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brief, odd reign as the biggest star in movies. This Coppertone age lasted from 1990, when two of the 10 top-grossing pictures were Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop, until 1993, when Last Action Hero—an attempt at a tonal gene splice between…
For the next ten days, all Hollywood eyes—and those of many a filmgoer—will turn toward the frigid wilds of Park City, Utah, reportedly experiencing its chilliest winter in a decade. Their collective hope: to discover at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (January 17 through 26) the next Beasts of the…
A chiller about two abandoned little girls and their bond to the wraith of the title, Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest. Instead, the movie — the first feature by Andy Muschietti, who co-scripted with his sibling Barbara and Neil Cross — distracts with too much…
The way to a queen’s heart is through Rousseau in A Royal Affair, in which church and state oppression can’t, at least for a time, quell enlightenment urges. From prostitute trysts and physician-conducted crotch examinations to wild-stallion rides through the lush countryside, everything is eroticized in Nikolaj Arcel’s historical drama…
In his brief remarks before the first public screening of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford praised the Sundance Institute’s ongoing filmmaker development labs as “our core,” noting that the festival itself was conceived “to create an audience for the filmmakers in our lab program.” That program has now…
“The Other Son” Movie Review
Originally slated to open in September, Gangster Squad was delayed when the movie-theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, suddenly made a scene of gunfire in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre “inappropriate.” Four months later, a turn in the film’s plot that relies on gunning down an adolescent risks recalling Newtown, but the proximity…
“Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” screenwriter Will Beall says of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second most famous employer, the Los Angeles Police Department, where he…
