Screen
More suspense from ‘Whiteout,’ please
Here's a really cool idea for a film: you're a U.S. Marshal working at a United States research facility in Antarctica, helping keep the peace. Like a campus cop, your primary job is dealing with drunks and minor thefts, but you're hoping that a major crime will ...
Puttin’ on the Fitz’
If “director Baz Luhrmann” and “restraint” have ever appeared in the same sentence together, they were the word-bread creating a sandwich around the phrase “has absolutely no.” Considering that the gaudy Jay Gatsby is basically Luhrmann’s spirit animal, the union ...
Corruption of small-town innocence
They were staples of popular literature, Broadway and the movies long before the movies could talk: comic yarns in which small-town naifs pack their bags and hit the big city, where they learn about life and love and what they’ve been missing...
Bad cops, bad script
Everything that does and does not work in Brooklyn’s Finest arrives in Scene One. A twitchy, cashstrapped detective played by Ethan Hawke is driving around with a shifty associate played by unbilled Vincent D’Onofrio. They park by a cemetery. (Warning.) Director ...
Guilty of misdirection
Conviction should have been a good film. After a woman’s beloved ne’erdo-well brother is convicted of murder in a tiny hick town, it’s up to her to exonerate him, first through the system and then by going to law school and becoming a one-client attorney. Better yet...
Film/STILL 1959
1959: fourteen years after the war ended and five years before The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, the cinema started to go democratic. Cameras were smaller, weighed less and cheaper, thereby allowing independent directors to make movies they wanted to make ...
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...
Under a rock
With 127 Hours, the Oscar-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire proves it’s possible to make a supercharged, perpetually kinetic movie about a man who can’t move. It is something, this film from director Danny Boyle, who adapted Aron Ralston’s memoir Between a Rock...
