Bone Tomahawk (Review)
A debut feature by S. Craig Zahler, this feels like a potential cult favorite; it’s strange and disturbing, but also imaginative and surprising. It displays a rare, impressive amount of patience. Although it’s a long 132 minutes, the movie’s greatest strength is its pacing. No moment feels wasted, and every moment is an opportunity for greater richness of character, or to ponder the rights and wrongs of the...
Our Brand is Crisis (Review)
The title of the new movie Our Brand Is Crisis may be a mouthful, but it’s a simple enough concept: in this day and age, political campaigns are not about politics, or people, but about advertising. Based loosely on Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary of the same name, the new movie turns a Bolivian election into a media battle. Hardened political consultant ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine (Sandra Bullock) — a fictional...
The Martian (Review)
On the website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They, Ridley Scott is rated among the 50 best directors of all time, one of only 11 living souls on the list. This rating is largely based on two films, both sci-fi efforts, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), as well as Thelma and Louise (1991) running a distant third. It certainly is not based on movies like Legend (1985), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), Kingdom of Heaven (2005),...
The Green Inferno (Review)
Director Eli Roth returns to the director’s chair with this vile, abhorrent, incompetent, dumb, hateful cannibal torture film. College freshman Justine (Lorenza Izzo), whose father is a UN lawyer, decides to become an activist to help stop female genital mutilation in other countries. She joins the charismatic Alejandro (Ariel Levy) on a trip to the Amazon to demonstrate against big companies bulldozing the rainforest. On the...
Sicario (Review)
Let’s take just a moment to sing the praises of Roger Deakins, who is surely one of the greatest living cinematographers, and, for that matter, probably one of the greatest of all time. He has shot several movies for the Coen brothers, including Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There (in black and white), and No Country for Old Men, as well as Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins’...
Black Mass (Review)
Like the character it portrays, Black Mass avoids flash and grandeur and joins a long tradition of good-if-not-great gangster movies. American moviemakers have been making gangster movies since the beginning of movies — Raoul Walsh’s 1915 Regeneration may have been the first — and there’s never any shortage of gangster stories, true or fictional. But sometimes filmmakers try to say something important about America or...
Pawn Sacrifice (Review)
Director Edward Zwick is pretty much an invention of the movie business. Ever since the inception of the Oscars, studios have divided their investments between movies that will hopefully make money, and movies that will hopefully make them look good. Oftentimes a genuinely great filmmaker will make a genuinely great film that actually gets noticed, but just in case, directors like Zwick are needed. Whereas a genuinely great director...
Time Out of Mind (Review)
People don’t generally go to see movies about homeless people, but Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind is something different and deserves to be seen. Director Moverman, recovering from a slight stumble with Rampart and returning to the glories of The Messenger, directs Time Out of Mind in an unconventional, appealingly immersive way. We’re introduced to our main character, George (Richard Gere) in a series of...
The Visit (Review)
M. Night Shyamalan is the filmmaker that fans love to hate. He stumbled out of the gate in the 1990s with a couple of comedy-dramas (the latter starring Rosie O’Donnell) and then struck gold with his third film, The Sixth Sense (1999), a legendary hit and a multiple Oscar-nominee. Since then, he has tried to re-create that film’s unique vibe, a languid, creepy mystery-horror, and always with a surprise twist. Following it...
A Walk in the Woods (Review)
While A Walk in the Woods could have been an overly earnest weepie or an embarrassing slapstick farce, it settles somewhere comfortably in-between. It’s inconsequential, but it should please fans of codger comedies. After living all over the world, travel writer Bill Bryson (Robert Redford) finds himself back in the U.S.A., semi-retired, giving inane TV interviews and attending one funeral too many. He decides to hike the 2000+...
The Transporter Refueled (Review)
Definitely rebooted and sequelized, if not exactly refueled, the fourth Transporter movie is broken down, out of gas, and any of a dozen other dead car metaphors. Likely it was dead from the drawing board. Continuing this series without Jason Statham was a dubious idea, and casting Ed Skrein as the Frank Martin character was another wrong step. Statham is a genuine movie star, popping off the screen from the moment he first appeared...
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (Review)
The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney is a force to be reckoned with. As a director or producer he has made movies about the corruption of Enron, the use of torture by the United States in Afghanistan, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, pedophilia in the Catholic Church, journalist Hunter S. Thomspon, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, athlete Lance Armstrong, the scandalized New York governor Eliot Spitzer, the war crimes of...
We Are Your Friends (Review)
Zac Efron and Emily Ratajkowski are both extremely attractive people who seem better suited to modeling than acting. They give empty portrayals as empty characters in an empty film, but at least the music is good. We Are Your Friends is about characters who don’t really seem like they would be friends in real life. They have very little in common, and their goals are superficial: fame, fortune, and a good time. In the San...
Z for Zachariah (Review)
Craig Zobel’s post-apocalyptic movie Z for Zachariah happily does away with mutated monsters, evil power mongers, chases, explosions, or grisly effects, and simply, effectively focuses on the deeds and emotions of three people. After some kind of nuclear disaster that has left the world a radioactive wasteland, a pretty farmer, Ann (Margot Robbie), has been able to survive, somehow untouched by the destruction. She grows food,...
Learning to Drive (Review)
Studios are starting to learn that “adult contemporary” movies are a nice little box office niche, things like The Help, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and The Hundred-Foot Journey, usually made by people who graduated from the Weinstein circle of filmmaking. The approach is soft and gooey, full of heartfelt gestures, and probably a few broad jokes. Like horror films, these types of movies can be made relatively cheaply...
American Ultra (Review)
American Ultra is the latest in a line of stoner movies, which have a not-so-long and not-so-grand tradition. Back in the 1930s, Reefer Madness attempted to warn viewers away from the “dangers” of smoking pot (you’ll turn into a crazed demon!) but in the 1960s, that movie became a hilarious cult classic for smokers to watch and enjoy while partaking. Cheech (Marin) and (Tommy) Chong had a huge hit with Up in Smoke...
Straight Outta Compton (Review)
Like only a very few, select musical acts, the hip-hop group N.W.A. burned very brightly and for a very short time. They created a single masterpiece, the album Straight Outta Compton (1988), and henceforth changed the way things were said and done. Dr. Dre created beats that were more than the simple two-four snaps used by Run-DMC, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys; they were musical. The title song has a tumbling quality, with a...
Fantastic Four (Review)
As the new Fantastic Four begins, focusing on young genius Reed Richards in middle school, it almost has a sense of wonder. It seems to come right out of those old 1980s movies in which kids on summer vacation with limitless imagination could do just about anything, movies like Explorers, The Goonies, or Space Camp (a mood that J.J. Abrams tried to pay homage to with his Super 8). As the characters grow up, that mood continues a...
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Review)
Though it has come a long way from Bruce Geller’s 1960s TV series (“Good luck, Jim. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”), the Mission: Impossible franchise occupies a nifty place in American action movies. Unlike the Avengers, James Bond, Bourne, the Transporter, or the Expendables, who charge headfirst into action, these highly-trained heroes are still somewhat reluctant. In a similar vein, Jackie Chan...
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