Gravity There’s a sequence of scenes in Alfonso Cuarón’s space thriller Gravity about half way through the film that starts tense, becomes nail-biting and then explodes – literally and figuratively – into a mind-boggling orchestra of space disaster action. I was clenching my boyfriend’s thigh and clenching my jaw at the beginning of it, but…
I’m sure some evolutionary psychologist has come up with a theory about why so many men get so much pleasure out of driving exceedingly fast. Speed, whether on foot or on a horse or in a mechanical contraption, makes us feel invincible, making us feel either that we can out run any enemy or catch…
Prisoners About half way through Denis Villeneuve’s haunting, absorbing and morally problematic Prisoners, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are screaming at each other. Keller is insisting that he knows that Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is the man who has kidnapped and hidden his and Franklin’s young daughters; Franklin, in tears, keeps…
Dianna Agron and John D’Leo in The Family After seeing Robert De Niro in Silver Linings Playbook last year, I was hopeful that he had turned a corner. Once considered the great actor of his generation, for almost twenty years, he was mostly phoning it in. But in Silver Linings Playbook, he worked his ass…
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who has been working at a large Hollywood studio. The conversation came around to closeted actors and actresses, and my friend repeated what another friend told her, “Vin Diesel? Oh, she’s a lady.” I laughed, not because it would be funny if…
Lee Daniels’ The Butler One of the problems with starting a movie with the words “Inspired by a true story” written on the screen is that most people will focus on “true story” and not on “inspired by.” That phrase opens Lee Daniels’ The Butler – which I will refer to as The Butler from…
The Canyons To say the least, it’s rare that a movie with a budget of $250,000 becomes the subject of a 7,600 word article in The New York Times Magazine. It makes a little more sense, when you know that The Canyons was directed by Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and…
I’m not sure why Woody Allen decided to set Blue Jasmine in San Francisco. He can turn a city into a main character of his films; from Manhattan to Vicki Cristina Barcelona to Midnight in Paris. But in Blue Jasmine, the city is neither lovingly shot nor does it really have a role to play…
When I was reading comics as a teenager, I was one of the few readers who did not claim that Wolverine was his favorite member of the X-Men. I found him a somewhat shallow construction, gruff and violent, with a mostly golden heart. The adamantium-clawed, cigar-chomping Canadian seemed obvious to me, the kind of character…
As I sat down to write my review of Fruitvale Station, hundreds of people were marching past my building, drumming, cheering and chanting, among other things, “Justice for Trayvon.” They could have just as easily been chanting, “Justice for Oscar.” Fruitvale Station is the story of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old black man from Hayward who…
