Gabriel Iglesias just may be the first celeb I’ve seriously drank with, if you can count knocking back a couple in a suite at Chicago’s James Hotel, ground zero for the star’s junket to promote this weekend’s opener and Iglesias’ stand-up concert film, The…
Read MoreEvery Year I Live, I Know Less About Love: Paul Haggis on Third Person’s Investigation into the Heart of an Artist
Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning writer and director who penned Million Dollar Baby and directed his own screenplay for Crash (movies that won consecutive Best Picture Oscars in 2005 and 2006), has maintained a lower profile in the last few years. And while his success…
Read MoreA tale told with sound and fury signifying perhaps the best big-budget sci-fi action movie since Avatar, director Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow is proof positive that a summer superthriller needn’t be mindless, this one so innovative in its storytelling and satisfying in its…
Read MoreIt’s been some time since I’ve felt overwhelmed by a movie, or maybe just a character. Perhaps even longer since I fell in love with one. That happened a few days ago, and I think I still have butterflies. In the unabashedly tear-inducing movie…
Read MoreThe main reason to see Maleficent, the new revisionist take on Sleeping Beauty featuring heavy doses of girl power and even more CGI, is its most special effect, a silky smooth performance by Angelina Jolie as the titular, anti-heroic villainess in spite of herself. Heretofore…
Read MoreForget about it being a summer franchise picture, because X-Men: Days of Future Past is a thoughtful and thematically dense anti-blockbuster, a movie full of ideas that largely eschews huge action set-pieces through most of its running time in favor of a surprisingly compelling…
Read MoreThe very definition of a crowd-pleaser, Jon Favreau’s Chef is as amiable and enjoyable a comedy as in recent memory, and one that ultimately works on sweetness and a solidly charming performance from its writer/director/star, whose film has real heart and big laughs. Chef…
Read MoreA superfluous rehash of a much better movie, Brick Mansions is the limp American version of the terrific 2006 French action picture District B13, which was a scrappy surprise that introduced the uninitiated to the high-flying sport of parkour and its gravity-defying founder, Gallic…
Read MoreTye Sheridan Comes of Age in David Gordon Green’s Joe, a Story of Hard Won Maturity in an Unforgiving South
In three films—Tree of Life, Mud and now Joe—seventeen-year-old actor Tye Sheridan has carved out a niche as a rural teen that experiences lost innocence and disillusionment about the world by close examinations of his adult role models. Remarkably sensitive and without posture, Sheridan…
Read MoreBased on the 1991 novel by Larry Brown, Nicolas Cage makes an undeniably impressive return to dramatic form as titular Joe Ransom, a hard-living Texas local, a small town former con both bitter and goodhearted, who frequents the local bar and whorehouse when he’s…
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