Screen
You say you want a revolution?
The “99 percent vs. the 1 percent” analogy at work in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire has all the subtlety of a funeral selfie. But it is precisely this lack of sophistication in message that may make this the most zeitgeist-capturing, intellectually resonant sci-fi ...
Home viewing: Writers on screen
Writers themselves aren’t that dramatic or empathetic a subject,” screenwriter Sarah Gubbins says. “As a genus and species they are wont to be solitary,...
‘Zombie’ hilarity
It takes a certain sense of humor to enjoy a horror comedy film like Zombieland, but if you can laugh at graphic violence and can see the humor in parody, then this is a great movie for you to catch. Full of brilliantly funny lines, Zombieland offers a zombie film ...
Cinema 101
I guess you could say the low point arrived on March 27, 2022, with the broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards. No, the “slap...
[Ir]replaceable you
If Jean-Luc Godard was correct when he surmised, “The history of cinema is the story of men filming women,” then the French auteur Olivier Assayas’s latest, Clouds of Sils Maria, adds the crucial word missing from that epigraph: young...
Don’t pity the A-Team
Based on the 1980s TV series of the same name, The A-Team starts with the formation of the team by former Army Rangers. Eighty successful missions later, they’re tricked into recovering stolen U.S. Mint plates that threaten to enable terrorists destroy the nation’s...
‘Astro Boy’ seems dated
Lovely dollops of wit and warmth float through the big screen version of Astro Boy, the latest Japanese TV cartoon to make it to the big screen. But the look, themes and slam-bang "Transformers" violence of that 1960s animated series make this every bit as dated as "...
Leni Riefen-stalling
On the one hand, any film subtitled “Part 1” is a naked cash grab. On the other hand, shut up and take my money, Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1...
Out with the old
There’s funny and then there’s funny, and A Good Old- Fashioned Orgy is neither. I suspect Contagion will be funnier...
Iron curtain hurtin’
With apologies to SNL’s Cecily Strong, during its first 40 minutes, Atomic Blonde is “the person you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with...