Screen
Mechanical failure
The Mechanic is Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham), a crack assassin who can kill his targets without leaving a trace, and even — as we learn later — implicate third parties in the crime. Impressive. Except as we watch Bishop blunder his way through target after target, ...
The eternal charm of the go-getter: Part one
Known as “the third genius,” Harold Lloyd did not have the same background in vaudeville as Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton; yet, he ended...
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 ...
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 meaning
Art saves lives. That’s not hyperbole or exaggeration. Creating art as a release has let countless razorblades sleep soundly in their drawers. Consuming art that expresses what someone can’t say themselves, something that tells them “you’re not alone” or distracts ...
Life during wartime
Ellis French (Jeremy Pope), a gay Black 20-something, trades the cold streets of New York City for the harsh regiment of Marine boot camp....
Roundup of summer 2015
When it comes to cinema, there is no such thing as dilution. No matter how many times a franchise is rebooted, a classic remade or an individualistic work of art sequalized, cinema will always remain as singular and potent as those who make it...
Too many Ds
When you remake a movie that originally starred Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider, it’s not a challenge to clear the bar that was set. Limbo-ing beneath it, however, would require a shrink-ray gun. So it is the faintest of all possible praises to say that Dredd 3D...
A more engaging Thing
The slippery, effective new version of The Thing serves as a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film, explaining what went down, down in Antarctica, after the intergalactic thing thawed and began eviscerating humans and a husky or two...
More vulgarity, please
In 1956, not long after she married Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe made a movie with director and star Laurence Olivier at England’s Pinewood Studios. The film, The Prince and the Showgirl, came from Terence Rattigan’s drawing-room ...
Direct action
As the human toll of global climate change comes into clearer view, attempts to find political or market solutions frustrate many environmentalists who call...

















