Screen
An aquatic beauty and the beast
There’s nothing like a good fairy tale, especially one with teeth — and Mexican writer/producer/director Guillermo del Toro has plenty of teeth to go...
Confusing hacktion
Are zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes? Is The Daily Show a news program with some comedy in it or a comedy program with some news in it? Is Blackhat a bad movie with a lot of good parts or a good movie with a lot of bad parts? The world may ...
Cotillard’s coattails
Given that France is America’s go-to national punching bag for milquetoast xenophobic jokes, it is a testimony to her towering talent that Marion Cotillard is an Oscar-winning box office draw. Even reducing her physical presence by a third in her latest, Rust and ...
Whirl fools
Imagine watching Star Wars and deciding the franchise should forever forward follow C-3PO. And that C-3PO was played by a former hunk who now...
Cage shines as corrupt New Orleans cop
"Anything’s possible in this storm!” says the man with the badge in Werner Herzog’s delirious Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year. It’s a very loose remake of 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, in which ...
Diverse-i-see
Beyond the delightful oceans of tasty, tasty tears wept by whiny dudes whenever a non-hetero, non-white, non-bruh picks up a lightsaber or kicks a...
‘The Messenger’ digs into a different side of the Army
America is an interesting country. Full of contradictions, hopes, failures and, every now and then, surprises. The nation is complex, to say the very least. Perhaps one of the clearest representations of these complexities is the war in Iraq...
An indecisive mash-up
I take notes as I watch films so that I can remember salient plot points, great effects, and idiotic story twists. During The Other Guys, I wrote down “buddy cop film from hell.” That might well sum up the weird mash-up that is The Other Guys, a movie that can’t ...
Many unhappy returns
The hackneyed, half-assed backstory for the lead character in Happy Death Day involves the tragic loss of her mother, which doesn’t actually feel sad...
The Great Buster: A Celebration
Before he was a filmmaker, Peter Bogdanovich was a critic and historian par excellence. Coming of age as the first wave of Hollywood filmmakers...
Object of my Affleck-tion
It’s easy to thrill people when they don’t know what’s coming. OK, maybe not easy — paging Mr. Shyamalan — but certainly less difficult than whipping up tension in a film based on a decades-old actual incident, the resolution of which is but a Google search away. ...
