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 ...
Fast, furious fun
As adolescent male power fantasies go, Fast Five has an undeniable trashy charm...
Geneticists and horror
Equal parts Species and The Savage is Loose, the eccentric and crafty new thriller Splice isn’t for audiences who require strong, noble rooting interests in their questing protagonists of science. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, neither of whom make it a habit to ...
You don’t want to ‘Hear About the Morgans’
Pure, communal silence can be a wonderful thing, and if you haven’t experienced any lately, I recommend you see the first available screening of the new romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? Each of its theoretical punch lines is preceded by an eerie second...
‘Valentine’s Day’ an ideal date movie
When making movies, it's possible to have too much of a good thing...
When death misses
There was a scene, lo those many (OK, 11) years ago, in the original Final Destination. One of the characters who inadvertently “cheated death” and ruined “death’s grand design” had holed up in a cabin, which then had to be made accident-proof...
Reel to reel | Week of December 12, 2013
All is Lost Robert Redford is brilliant in his role as a nameless man who must survive after his sailboat sinks leaving him lost at sea. Rated PG-13. At Colony Square. The Armstrong Lie In 2008, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (We Steal Secrets: The ...
Awful everything
The good news for Paul W.S. Anderson is that Uwe Boll, his only serious competition for worst movie-maker in the biz, has another BloodRayne movie on the way...
Class warfare wedding
So few ensemble-driven African- American films make it to market — whether with familiar faces or unknowns — that the ones that do get out of the gate provoke a weird degree of scrutiny regarding what they have to say about the black experience. Who needs the ...
BW BIFF Picks 2013: ‘The New Public’
In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the high school graduation rate is 40 percent. The New Public, a documentary by Jyllian Gunther, tells the story of a small group of high school teachers and administrators who tackle that problem by opening a small ...
