Screen
Lonely Hearts’ Club
Let’s be honest, Love Is All You Need (or Den Skaldede Frisør if Danish is more than a donut to you) is basically redundant escapist fantasy. But when the fantasy services the desires of middle-aged women struggling with uncompassionate husbands and cancer and not ...
Tom Cruise’s foreign policy
If you conceived a child back when Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch, it would now be old enough to tell you to move on. Despite welcoming back rapists and murderers when they win a Super Bowl, modern society seems intent on holding a grudge against a guy who, at ...
Hunters becoming hunted
The 1987 film Predator inspired a number of spinoffs, from the inane (Alien vs. Predator) to the ghastly (Predator 2), and it was definitely time for a reboot before the titular hunter became a tedious cliché. Predators is a nonstop thrill ride of an action film, ...
Leave only memories; take only pictures
Images hold a very special place in the mind of the viewer. Simultaneously of one time and timeless, objective and subjective, images bring forth textures and dimensions often lost in memory that can reduce the complex into simplistic categories of black and white...
Brutality depicted
New rule: You can watch Django Unchained as many times as you want, but you have to watch 12 Years a Slave at least once first...
Getting lazy about slackers
The Art of Getting By is a screen romance that echoes its title: It gets by. Barely. It’s another wan tale of an anti-social teen who finds himself irresistible to the sweetest, prettiest girl in school. But the film has flashes of wit and some interesting teen ...
In need of altar-ations
Complaining about the length of a film can be a cop-out, a lazy way to avoid dissecting actual content in favor of basically whining about how valuable your free time is. But jokes about The Five-Year Engagement being long enough to legally make its audience common...
‘Spy Next Door’ not worth a ticket
I'm a lukewarm Jackie Chan fan. He’s been in some terrific films, notably Rush Hour and The Forbidden Kingdom, but he’s also been in a lot of movies that are stupid, including the Rush Hour sequels and the ghastly Around the World in 80 Days...
An Ang Lee masterpiece
Being stranded in the middle of an unforgiving ocean is a theme that’s been explored in films as diverse as Swiss Family Robinson and Hitchcock’s surprisingly tense Lifeboat. But being cast adrift for more than 200 days in a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger? It ...
On her own terms
Amy Schumer tries everything. Especially when it comes to shooting a one-night stand for her movie...