JANE GOT A GUN tries to evoke Leone (check the duster Jane sports) and Ford (check the mesas that surround her), but without the intensity of the former, or the adventure of the latter. What’s left is a stereopticon of a post-modern morality tale that can’t overcome its own inertia.
DIRTY GRANDPA
We will commence with the flensing of DIRTY GRANDPA momentarily. Before we begin, though, a brief summary of the plot of Mel Brooks’ THE PRODUCERS. In that film, more the original rather than the musical remake, we were delighted by the inspired but appalling behavior of producer Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, his hapless accountant turned… Read More »
13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI
With his trademark bombast, Michael Bay addresses the tragedy of Benghazi with great attention to the details of battle, and only the most superficial of attitudes towards everything else. Based on the book by Mitchell Zuckoff that recounted the 2012 attack by local insurgents on the temporary American embassy and the CIA station in that… Read More »
MOONWALKERS
It’s not that I believe every conspiracy theory that comes along, it’s just that I have a serious weakness for the imagination that goes into some of them. And so it is with the theory that while Apollo 11 may or may not have actually landed on the moon in 1969, the footage that we… Read More »
THE REVENANT
With THE REVENANT, Alejandro González Iñárritu has taken the true story of early 19th-century frontier scout Hugh Glass, and admirably manipulated it into a spiritual journey of savage poetry. Glass’s story, rendered cinematically in the 1970’s by Richard Harris in MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, becomes much more here. Iñárritu uses the bare bones of the… Read More »
THE HATEFUL EIGHT
THE HATEFUL EIGHT is an impudent, pugnacious comedy that uses the synthetic nature of its stylized homage idiom to be a whip-smart consideration of race, gender, politics, situational ethics, and very, very bad teeth. The genre is the western, but the tone is thoroughly modern as a group of the damned journey through the desolate… Read More »
THE BIG SHORT
If there is one point THE BIG SHORT makes, it’s that just because something has never happened before, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it can’t. And that it takes someone with the comic sensibility of co-writer Adam McKay, a director known for THE OTHER GUYS and TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE LEGEND OF RICKY BOBBY, to… Read More »
SON OF SAUL
The first image in SON OF SAUL is a green landscape that is out of focus. There is the sound of someone in distress, and the image of a man walking towards the camera until his impassive face fills the screen and comes into focus. Much else comes into focus in the course of this… Read More »
SISTERS
The one questions that reverberates through SISTERS is why didn’t the stars, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, write the script? They are producers, after all, and would seem, therefore, to have the clout to get any script that they wanted made, and yet, they have opted to squander their considerable talents on an egregiously plug-and-play… Read More »
LEGEND
LEGEND is not the first biopic of the notorious Kray Brothers to hit the big screen. The identical twin brothers, who were both vicious gangsters and pop-culture celebrities in the 1950s and 60s, were portrayed by the Kemp brothers, Gary and Martin as Ronnie and Reggie respectively in 1990’s THE KRAYS, a film that spent… Read More »
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