Screen
Fun with boxing
Six years ago, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby showed up late in the release calendar and walloped enough fans of boxing melodrama cliches to send it straight to the Academy Awards. Now comes The Fighter, an off-center but exceptional boxing film that I prefer ...
Reasonably entertaining diversion
Oh my God, they’ve shot Dame Helen Mirren! Realizing the Oscar-winning actress is playing a part, and not herself, the thought nonetheless is inescapable when Mirren’s ex-CIA agent takes a bullet in RED. I mean: How dare they...
Liveaction Oscar shorts a big deal
Start small. That’s the guiding dictum for everything from biological evolution to filmmaking. The live-action shorts that mark the start of most directors’ careers rarely see the light of day outside of specialized festivals; that is, except for the lucky bunch ...
Reel to reel | Week of October 10, 2013
Blue Jasmine After everything in her life falls to pieces, elegant New York socialite Jasmine moves into her sister Ginger’s modest apartment in San Francisco to try to pull herself back together again. Rated PG. At Boedecker, Esquire, Colony Square. Captain ...
Not genius, but still good
The most startling shot in Paranormal Activity 3 is something even the film’s determined unbelievers would concede to be damnably effective...
Sensationalism, not drama
One of the great mysteries of filmgoing relates to a question the medium has posed since its infancy: When is “too much” just right...
