AltWeeklies Wire
Animated Resistance Hollywood Creates a New Genre of Kids Movie
There’s a strong subtext of socio-political resistance at play in “The Lego Movie.” It may be the first mainstream animated resistance film ever made by a Hollywood studio.
Saturday Night Special: My Childhood, Playing with Guns
It wasn’t officially what the media called a “Saturday Night Special.” Nevertheless, my stepdad, a professional magician in every sense of the phrase — he was a master of sleight-of-hand and just about everything else — referenced the term so many times that that was what I called the .25 caliber revolver he kept in his nightstand drawer.
Ivan Reitman's Near-Movie is a Soap-Opera Disaster
There’s almost a movie — one with serious incest issues — hiding somewhere in writer/director Jason Reitman’s bleary attempted adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s novel.
James Bond’s Placeholder: Chris Pine Does the Heavy Lifting
For a no frills spy thriller, Kenneth Branagh directs a respectable rendering of Tom Clancy’s well-worn Jack Ryan superspy character.
SEALS Out of Water and Facts: How a Goat Herder Handed The U.S. Military its Ass
All films are political. All film is propaganda. Knowing that Peter Berg’s seemingly straight-ahead war picture is little more than a two-hour recruitment commercial designed for the U.S. military to attract testosterone-bubbling American males more interested in the size of their biceps than in ways they might use their minds to advance their lives, is part and parcel to the film’s equation.
A Mistress to Dickens: Ralph Fiennes Does Merchant Ivory with Felicity Jones
Ralph (pronounced “rafe”) Fiennes’s second directorial venture — following his adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” — is the closest thing to a Merchant Ivory production to come along since that venerable company ceased making films.
Invisible Shadows: The Martin Scorsese Movie That Isn’t
There is no reason to see Martin Scorsese’s latest picture. Centered around its irredeemable greed-crazed anti-hero antagonist Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), “The Wolf of Wall Street” is an oddly inert piece of capitalist voyeurism that worships at the altar of its host.
TOP-TEN FILMS OF 2013 VIDEO COLUMNnew
Whew! What a great year for cinema. Hollywood may have dropped the ball with a blockbuster summer of busts — only Gore Verbinski’s vastly underrated “Lone Ranger” left a mark — but foreign, documentary, and independent films more than picked up the slack.
Iran’s Oscar Bait: Asghar Farhadi Could Return to the Red Carpet
Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “A Separation,” is a melodramatic romantic mystery with dangling threads. That’s not a put-down.
Staring Blank: Spike Jonze’s Intelligence is Artificial
Where Spike Jonze once soared using magical realism — albeit written by someone else — as his guide (see “Being John Malkovich”) he now flounders with a self-penned technology driven story that shrivels before your eyes.
A Family Problem: Not Your Mother’s Meryl Streep
Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play loses an hour-and-a-half from its original running time, but none of its dramatic impact in the playwright’s own screenplay adaptation.
Fire and Ice: Scott Cooper Delivers on Promise
Scott Cooper’s American character study-thriller bursts at the seams.
Christmas Gush: Emma Thompson Saves The Holidays
A Hollywood tailor made crowd-pleaser, “Saving Mr. Banks” utilizes as much fantasy as fact in the telling of Walt Disney’s tenacious efforts to transform “Mary Poppins” into a movie — with the necessary approval of its popular children’s-book author.
A Sloppy Con: Good Delivery — Bad Form
If awards were handed out for the sloppiest movies, “American Hustle” would be a dead ringer for just such a booby prize.
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW: COLE SMITHEY'S CLASSIC CINEMA
Formulated as a Nouvelle Vague-styled homage to Howard Hawks’s “Red River,” Peter Bogdanovich’s brilliant adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s 1966 novel is a haunting coming-of-age movie that encapsulates the death of the Old West through the microcosmic prism of a small Texas town.
