Screen
Reel to reel | Week of Feb. 13
About Last Night An updated version of the classic romantic comedy. This film follows two couples from pickup line to bedroom. Rated R. At Century. All Is Lost Robert Redford stars in All Is Lost, an open-water thriller about one man’s battle for survival against ...
Fast and cheap
Fast, cheap and out of control, and set in glamorous Grand Rapids, Mich., director Ruben Fleischer’s 30 Minutes or Less doesn’t even crack the 80-minute mark if you exclude the end credits. The same was true of Fleischer’s feature film debut, the very funny ...
reel to reel | Week of Dec. 1, 2011
Arthur Christmas Arthur Christmas is not a perfect gift, but it does feature enough holiday cheer and silly fun to make it more entertaining than 10 lords a-leaping. It helps that the film has a warm message about how tradition should never be sacrificed for ...
Quirking on something different
To alter a phrase from Twain — who probably won’t mind because he’s dead — writer/ director Wes Anderson repeated history until he figured out how to rhyme. Barring a brief foray into stop-motion animation, Anderson’s oeuvre for the last decade redundantly hit the ...
Slipping Mickey
Gather ‘round kids and hear a story from the days of yore, a time when artists drew cartoons with their actual human hands and not every children’s movie had covert sex jokes for ma and pa to chuckle at. It was a time before everything was glossy and smooth, before ...
Reel to reel | April 26, 2012
21 JUMP STREET Two young police officers and ex-classmates go undercover at a local high school to investigate a dangerous drug ring. Rated R. At Century and Colony Square. — Los Angeles Times/MCT AMARCORD This foreign language Oscar winner is a semi-...
Ferrell-in-training
The alcoholic son of an alcoholic, sales manager Nick Porter was born in a Raymond Carver short story called “Why Don’t You Dance?” published in the 1981 Carver collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The story, which takes place at a yard sale among...
Carano lacks punch
In terms of its title, Haywire doesn’t quite go there; it’s more “Haywire-ish.” But it’s eccentric, and the on-screen violence is sharp and exciting — brutal without being either subhumanly sadistic or superhumanly ridiculous...
Merchandise in lieu of a movie
Cars 2 had every chance to improve upon the leisurely 2006 animated feature from Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Studios. Yet here we are, stuck with a merchandising assembly line in lieu of a movie. Despite its technical and design finesse, this ranks as ...
