Screen
Making a game of it
Most graphic novel-based films shed the visual style of the original work, though a few have tried to present a hybrid view, notably Sin City and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the first to offer up a unique hybrid where the action, ...
Reel to reel | Week of August 16, 2012
AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY Ai Weiwei is China’s most famous international artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. At Chez Artiste and Century. — Landmark Theatres THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Peter Parker gets a new look (and an origin story) in this Marvel remake ...
Short but sweet
For decades, the Oscar for short film was the ignored stepchild of the Academy Awards. In times of limited distribution, the question was never which short film deserved the award most, but rather which nominee had been viewed by the most judges. The award was a ...
‘Broken Embraces’ isn’t funny
"Films have to be finished," intones Mateo, the blind-former-filmmaker. "Even if you do it blindly...
Running with it
A rich and surprisingly old-fashioned musical biopic, The Runaways has neither the bloat nor the blather of your average Hollywood treatment of stars on the rise. It’s pungent and quick on its feet, capturing the clubs, the shag-heavy interiors and the Farrahhaired...
Define ‘run’
At this point, there is just one Liam Neeson movie: Taken a Non-Stop Run All Night to Walk Among the Tombstones 3. Neeson isn’t in the midst of some Nicolas Cage supernova, in which an actor’s need to perpetually work and “get dat paper” creates an acting black hole ...
Wahlberg pulls through
Playing a reformed cargo smuggler sucked back into the game, Mark Wahlberg is the star of Contraband, a fairly entertaining remake of the 2008 Icelandic thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam...
‘Edge of Darkness’ needs more Gibson
Moviegoers can rest easy. Mel Gibson is back in the business of starring in violent, paranoid thrillers. Back in the business of starring in movies — period...
Class warfare wedding
So few ensemble-driven African- American films make it to market — whether with familiar faces or unknowns — that the ones that do get out of the gate provoke a weird degree of scrutiny regarding what they have to say about the black experience. Who needs the ...
Rom-com yawn
The business plan behind CBS Films is simple: midsize projects with good-size headliners, such as Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser of the inaugural CBS Films effort Extraordinary Measures, or Jennifer Lopez, who co-stars with Aussie hunk Alex O’Loughlin in the ...
