The release of No, which was nominated for an Oscar this year for Best Foreign Film, in early March positions it to be a sleeper hit in our winter of cinematic discontent. It’s been a bad year at the movies so far, as nearly every film released has been either a critical or commercial failure.…
From the studio that last year brought you Dark Shadows, Snow White and the Huntsman and other monstrosities comes Jack the Giant Slayer, another effects-driven behemoth that buries its human elements beneath the shiny stuff that kids like. The film was marketed as an “adult” take at the Jack and the Beanstalk legend. If that’s…
The question is not whether A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth film in which grizzled New York cop John McClane fails to acquiesce to the ending implicit in its title, is worth seeing. It’s not. It’s a terrible, terrible movie. The only question is where your mind will wander while the film fails…
It was either an ironic quirk of fate or a stroke of genius by the theater manager. As I waited in the dim lighting for Stand Up Guys to start, “Por Una Cabeza” was piped in over the theater’s sound system. It’s the song Al Pacino danced the tango to in that famous scene in…
Netflix is having a moment. On January 23, the home entertainment platform proudly announced an 8% increase in revenue in the last quarter of 2012. The next day, the company’s stock soared to a 43% increase, the largest single-day gain since the company went public more then a decade ago. All of a sudden, Netflix…
An early scene in The Last Stand finds three of its characters firing a giant handgun at a huge slab of beef. It’s an apt snapshot of a movie that fetishizes the use of firearms and places little value on human life. At this time when pundits and policymakers are considering the impact of movie…
The producers of Les Miserables have owned the film rights for decades, and they have stated in recent interviews that they were waiting for the right time and the right director. They got the time right – the film’s themes of economic oppression, income inequality, and a rigged criminal justice system seem tailor-made for our…
There is a scene early on in Django Unchained in which bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) offers a deal to Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave whom he has just bought. Schlutz, a foreigner, is opposed to slavery, but he needs Django to help him track and kill three men for whom a large bounty…
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