At Any Price is a startling accomplishment: a deeply populist film about an issue affecting rural America and featuring a genuine movie star. Dennis Quaid may not be Hollywood’s hot young thing anymore, but he has improved with age, and he gives the performance of a lifetime as Henry Whipple, a fourth-generation Iowa corn farmer…
Much has been written about the recent shift in Matthew McConaughey’s career. After years of awful rom-coms like Failure to Launch and Ghost of Girlfriends Past, there has been a significant and sudden change in his work, and the excitement amongst critics is palpable. In just the last two years, McConaughey has starred in five celebrated independent…
It’s hard to mock Washington these days because Washington is doing such a good job of mocking itself. Our politics have become parody, and political comedy has become redundant. It’s why 1600 Penn didn’t resonate with anyone. Veep has scored decent ratings and offers a few laughs per episode, but it doesn’t seem to have…
Is it too much to expect originality from a summer blockbuster these days? At this point in our era of poll-testing and demographics-driven production, we should accept this simple fact: no studio is going to spend $120 million, the cost of the new sci-fi blockbuster Oblivion, on an idea that has not already been demonstrated…
Personally, I can’t hear Robert Redford utter the word “secrets” without my mind drifting back to Sneakers, the 1992 minor cult classic in which Redford portrayed a computer hacker and former countercultural leader who avoids arrest and goes underground for twenty-five years before his identity is discovered and used against him. The film bears more than…
Last season, as I reviewed and analyzed every episode of season one of Veep, I noted on more than one occasion that nothing much changed from episode to episode. Vice-President Selina Meyer continuously strove for relevance in the political arena. She was given several substantive issues to lead on, only to see POTUS downgrade her…
Spring break. Spring break. Spring break. The words form a siren song in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, a recurring dream that lures American boys and girls to their demise. When four young American teenagers rob a restaurant so that they can afford a trip to Florida, we know that nothing good will come of their…
The Place Beyond the Pines is just a movie, but it arrives with the unreasonable expectations of a savior. Not only does it star the so-hot-right-now Bradley Cooper and the perpetually-hot Ryan Gosling, but the film is being released in the dregs of a particularly poor winter for cinema. Need I count the ways that…
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