There might be something to that quitting while you’re ahead thing. An auteur’s auteur, Terence Malick crafted an indelible, unimpeachable reputation as a visionary filmmaker with just two films, Badlands (1972) and Days of Heaven (1978), both made in the 1970s. For the better part of two decades, rumors swirled around new projects…
If we’ve learned anything – anything at all – from Jurassic Park I-III, Jurassic World, and no doubt, the forthcoming sequel, Jurassic World II, it’s this simple message: Life always finds a way and by way, we mean, mess with Mother Nature – or in the case of Life: The Movie, a science-fiction/horror film directed by Daniel…
When DRIB first gets going, it is a fairly standard documentary. There is the talking head interview, a knowing narration, and a smattering of news clips. It fits its mold well, offering little in the way of surprises and that seems to be director…
Sing (Universal Home Entertainment) is about impresario Buster Moon (voice of Matthew McConaughey), a down-on-his-luck koala. He’s trying to save his deteriorating theatre by staging a singing competition to attract audiences. A prize of $1,000 is offered, but a typo that adds a few more zeros turns the contest into the hottest amateur show ever. The contestants are …
With their third collaboration together, Joe Swanberg and Jake Johnson have solidified themselves as an incredibly lucrative and exciting creative. Their latest outing, Win It All, is electric and contagious fun that easily ranks among the best stuff Swanberg has ever done
Live By Night (Warner Home Video), the new film starring and directed by Ben Affleck, is a Prohibition Era gangster tale of dangerous romance, vengeance, and underworld politics necessitated by changing times. Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, an Irish-American World War I vet from Boston who turns to a life of crime after returning home from …
Miss Sloane (20th Century-Fox) of the title is Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain, The Help), an intelligent ice queen of a Capitol Hill lobbyist whose entire life is her work. She is self-assured, determined, focused, and goal oriented, qualities considered admirable and enviable in a man but rub many the wrong way in a woman. Working in a …
Through the support of director Bill Condon and a magnificent cast, the live action remake of the 1991 Disney classic Beauty and the Beast is deserving of recognition, though it doesn’t particularly add anything new to the film. Filled with great performances, and a story everyone knows and loves, Condon plays it safe, deviating little…
Like any good French filmmaker, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, Demonlover, Irma Vep) has crafted both an offscreen persona as a hyper-intellectual filmmaker and openly courted, if not controversy, then audience disengagement and alienation. Under one interpretation, a true auteur and mainstream filmmaking…
As demented and blood-soaked a road trip movie as you’re ever to see, 68 Kill transcends its violent and pulpy midnight movie roots by telling a perpetually unpredictable story that shatters expectations and denies genre conventions.