Prolific Hollywood screenwriter and director Richard LaGravenese’s new picture, the bittersweet The Last Five Years, based on the off-Broadway musical and starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan as young Manhattan transplants who fall into and out of careers, love and life together, was a…
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There isn’t a more affable star than Oscar-winner Kevin Costner, the iconic actor-director with so many modern classics in his canon—Dances with Wolves, JFK, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, A Perfect World—and an artist who brings a patented movie star sheen to every performance.…
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Thanks to director Kevin Macdonald’s tense, tight-quartered new submarine thriller Black Sea, we now know exactly what it feels like to be trapped on the bottom of the ocean at death’s door, mortality staring us in the face, survival chances slim. The movie presents…
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Few pictures this season reach the complexity and substance of The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turning, the genius mathematician plucked from Cambridge to assemble a crack team of code breakers and decipher Enigma, the German communications waging World War II. From the…
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A picture as intelligent and sophisticated as the offbeat new drama I Origins is a rarity in American movies, but given that this one was written and directed by Mike Cahill, who gave us 2011’s similarly thoughtful Another Earth, it’s no surprise. But his…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Raid 2: Berandal (meaning thug), is quite an accomplished movie, and one that took me by complete surprise. If you saw 2012’s The Raid, the scrappy story of two Jakarta SWAT cops who took down a cabal of drug pushers holed up in…
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You won’t find a better acting ensemble this year than the sprawling cast of August: Osage County, the new film adaptation of Tracy Letts’ celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning play, about an extended—and highly dysfunctional—southern family reuniting on the Oklahoma plains after the patriarch’s death. This…
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