THE JUDGE is everything thats wrong with studio bids for Oscar consideration. A carefully calculated effort designed to hit all the perceived necessary tropes to qualify as both important and as quality. Alas, it is neither. True, there are excellent performances by Robert Downey, Jr., Robert Duvall, Vera Farmiga, and Billy Bob Thornton, but they… Read More »
THE SINGING DETECTIVE
Translating a first-rate concept from one medium to another is always a risky business, even a remake of a film carries with it the seeds of its own destruction as iconic stars and situations are recreated only to be endlessly compared to the original. Thus it is that THE SINGING DETECTIVE, so superb as a… Read More »
GOTHIKA
You have to wonder if the makers of GOTHIKA started out to make a comedy and then realized that something had gone awry. This would explain a great many things and I don’t just mean the unintentional laughter that this would-be supernatural thriller evokes. Our heroine is Miranda Grey (Halle Berry), a brilliant psychiatrist with… Read More »
GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK
In a lesser film about Edward R. Murrow and the way he used television to bring down Joseph McCarthy, there would have been the obligatory unburdening scene with his wife. He would articulate the risks involved in what he was undertaking personally, professionally, and financially, have an emotional breakdown of some sort, and Mrs. Murrow… Read More »
KISS KISS BANG BANG
Films detailing the dark side of Hollywood have been around for a long time and for a long time they’ve suffered from the excesses of hack films that approach the subject with a taste for the lurid and the seamy. Shane Black’s KISS KISS BANG BANG certainly doesn’t skimp on the lurid stuff nor on that… Read More »
ZODIAC (2007)
The pedestrian way to film the story of ZODIAC, the San Francisco Bay Area serial killer whose rampage extended from the late 1960s through the 1970s, would be to make a taut action thriller with snazzy directing tricks and gung-ho dialogue. Here was a psychopath who hunted people for sport and through a combination of smarts… Read More »
IRON MAN — DVD
Itâs not the reason for most of us to go out and purchase the IRON MAN DVD, but it is certainly worth noting that a preview for the J. J. Abrams Star Trek flick is on it. The real reason to buy the DVD, or at least rent it, is the whiz-bang action, the sense… Read More »
IRON MAN — DVD
Itâs not the reason for most of us to go out and purchase the IRON MAN DVD, but it is certainly worth noting that a preview for the J. J. Abrams Star Trek flick is on it. The real reason to buy the DVD, or at least rent it, is the whiz-bang action, the sense… Read More »
IRON MAN
IRON MAN is terrific. Full of explosions, one-liners, and nifty special effects, it goes the extra mile of casting Robert Downey, Jr., one of the best actors working today, in the title role. In his capable hands, Tony Stark, inventor and purveyor of the world’s finest hi-tech weapons and party guy extraordinaire, is not just… Read More »