MOVIE REVIEW: For the first 25 years of his career, Woody Allen couldn’t make a bad movie. In fact, he made several inarguable masterpieces like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Then about 15 years ago – shortly after he left Mia Farrow for Farrow’s adopted daughter and was then accused of molesting his own…
MOVIE REVIEW Everything Must Go Written and directed by Dan Rush Starring Will Ferrell, Rebecca Hall, and Christopher Jordan Wallace Rated R At Landmark Hillcrest The world is supposed to care about Everything Must Go because it stars Will Ferrell in a dramatic role. He’s trying to be taken seriously as a serious actor, to…
At the screening of Bridesmaids that I attended with my husband, during the few lulls between thunderous guffaws we could hear the young blonde woman sitting next to Rob commenting on the plot to her mother: “What a bitch!” “Aw, he’s so cute!” “That would never happen!” As we walked out, she said, “If my…
MOVIE REVIEW Water for Elephants Directed by Francis Lawrence Written by Richard LaGravenese Starring Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz Rated PG-13 A few weeks ago, Entertainment Weekly published a letter from a reader expressing astonishment that the magazine’s cover story on Water for Elephants focused almost exclusively on Robert Pattinson while his costar…
I’ve never liked horror movies or slasher films. As a genre, they’re usually exploitative; they go for the basest emotions, the simplest reactions, using buckets of blood to gross you out, gratuitous sex to get a rise out of you and the lamest of surprises to get you to jump out of your seat. The…
About two-thirds of the way through Hanna, Marissa, the CIA agent hunting the film’s title character, says, “Sometimes children are bad people, too.” You already know that Hanna isn’t bad, just badass – a 13-year-old superhuman fighting machine Marissa created and now wants to kill. You feel for the naïve Hanna and hate the sociopathic…
The premise of Source Code would be hard for most people to wrap their heads around. It’s not surprising that Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) has a particularly hard time because he’s … well … I’m having a hard time deciding whether explaining the situation Colter is in would constitute a spoiler. It’s that complex,…
I would think it would be unpleasant to be Paul Giamatti. To me, he’s a sort of male version of Saturday Night Live’s Debbie Downer, a character played by Rachel Dratch who ruins everyone’s fun by pointing out how awful her life is. Her every complaint is followed by a sad trombone. And when I…
I assume, at some point, Josh Radnor struggled. Before he landed one of the leads in the hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother and became a multimillionaire, he must have faced disappointment, doubt and debt. Right? Right? Well, if he used to experience daily rejection after daily auditions, scribble on his MacBook in twee…
In the last 100 years, there have been 19 films based on Charlotte Bronte’s classic 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Yes, 19. The director of the most recent, Cary Fukunaga, joked in The New York Times last week that a new version has to be made every five years. I must admit, however, that despite the…
