You’ve heard the saying, no man is an island, and this holds true even if some men would like to think of themselves as lone wolves. Nothing beats a good bonding session with the mates over a couple of pints, an adventure cross country on […]
It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that it is Halloween this weekend. The holiday itself is rather unique as it allows participants to choose two different ways to celebrate and enjoy this feast of all things horrible. You can go more colorful, more ‘child friendly’ […]
I went to see ‘Her’ last weekend. Have you seen it? It’s set in LA sometime in the not-too-distant future. Joaquin Phoenix, who I think is an exceptionally gifted actor (let’s just forget about the weird performance art movie shit), plays Theodore, a lonely person […]
American Sniper is the story of a brilliant marksman, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), credited with more than 160 confirmed kills in Iraq. Never meant to be a 100 percent true version of Kyle’s life, we are asked to consider the differences between Kyle […]
In spite of all the hype and meaningless ‘Black Woody Allen’ comparatives, for those of us familiar with his work for a while, Chris Rock is finally starting to really get his shit together. A shiny, effervescent prose poem dedicated to the human condition, warts […]
One of the more amusing impressions given by Hollywood is that Boston is a sort of giant schizophrenic public house where academics and violent white trash begrudgingly coexist. Places like Charlestown, South Boston a/k/a ‘Southie’ and Dorchester – bastions of Irish white trash up there […]
Having never been much of a fan of Keanu Charles Reeves, I was not expecting too much out of John Wick beyond a lot of shooting, car chases and Canadian-accented mumbling. What I got instead was an excellent souped-up little violent crime-thriller with heart. One […]
It’s rare to find an old-fashioned taut thriller carefully threaded together to keep you on the very edge of your sea throughout. Directed with a sure hand by Yann Demange, who has cut his teeth on television with comedy shows like Man in a Box […]
Gone Girl, whether you like it or not, and I’m not sure how I feel, is definitely more than a thriller. It is what my old teacher Julia Cameron called an audience picture. But there’s also a kind of naughty gutlessness to it. Like the […]
I like to cry at movies. But it’s been a long, long time since Pan’s Labyrinth and, before that, Enemies: a Love Story had me weeping up a storm. Cynical tear-jerkers have always been around; yet there have always been gifted writer-directors like Douglas Sirk, […]
Everybody loved Boyhood, the unprecedented Richard Linklater epic that was shot over a 12-year period between 2002 and 2014. I knew everybody loved it, but until I saw it a few nights ago, I knew nothing else about it. I generally prefer knowing little about […]
In the never-ending quest to pilfer the meaningfulness out of each other’s work, the old Joe Mankiewicz tenet of “Distil! Distil!” has been reduced from fine, clear moonshine into R-Rated, raunchy, racially inclusive pap, vaguely recognizable as being something indeed familiar, yet strongly malodorous in […]
Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes manages to pull off a conundrum to a conundrum… A sequel to the hugely successful Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), directed by Rupert Wyatt, which was a sequel in turn of Tim Burton’s […]
Godzilla was always the coolest. Godzilla was the dragon/dinosaur monster created by the perfect world of science and reason gone wrong. There were other monsters – King Kong, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Dracula and The Wolfman – and all owned their little niches and cult followings, […]
Le Weekend Written by Hanif Kureishi Directed by Roger Mitchell This is a really fine little character study and I can’t help but question who decided to market this movie in its trailers as a sort of happy-sweet mousse of British comedy. A sharp-witted take […]
Above image by Jason and Bonnie Grower / Shutterstock.com copy Donald Rumsfeld may not know it, but he’d make a fantastic stand-up. “I don’t do quagmires,” Rumsfeld once told Helen Thomas at a White House morning briefing when she was trying to work in comparatives of […]
As I have stated before, sometimes kids movies have a wider appeal, and I am a sucker for cartoons… but The Lego Movie is so much more. For starters it’s filmed to look stop-motion (although its cgi) but these touches are what make it stand […]
Nebraska is the latest film to be directed by Alexander Payne, the man responsible for bringing us such bittersweet gems as Sideways and About Schmidt – which forever burned into the brain the image of what it would be like to see an old Jack […]
George Clooney, love him or hate him, is one of the highest-grossing actors of all time with over US$1.56bn total box office gross. He has been involved in 13 films that grossed over US$200m at the worldwide box office. Having become a grand TV star […]
Any kind of violence against children is a virtually unspeakable issue to most people. There is an absolute urge to give out the most graphic, specific detail when it comes to adults beating and butchering one another, but, as the tragic life of Michael Jackson […]
