Oliver Stone’s Savages is being hailed as a return to form for the maverick filmmaker, and in telling the lurid tale of two Southern California pot dealers ensnared in a vicious Mexican cartel, he pulls out all the stops—beheadings, torture, steamy sex, dirty double-crosses,…
The cynic in me says that The Amazing Spider-Man, the reboot of the Marvel movie franchise that comes just seven years on the heels of the last film in the series, 2005’s Spider-Man 3, is merely a studio marketing move to cash in on…
When meeting actor Joe Manganiello, any reaction less than, say, awe would probably be insufficient. Unlike most celebrities, who in person do not often resemble their 40-foot visages, the 6’5” rugged former athlete and Carnegie Mellon-schooled drama grad is the personification of a god,…
Channing Tatum delivers a sensitive performance in Magic Mike, Steven Soderbergh’s smart new picture about a star male stripper in Tampa who has the money, the women and the glory – but really just wants to settle down with a nice girl and start…
The main reason to see People Like Us, about a hotshot who does some growing up after returning home for his father’s funeral, is the performance of Elizabeth Banks as an down-on-her-luck single mother with a lot of baggage, valiantly trudging along until she…
There’s been a lot of talk about how Magic Mike, the “male stripper movie” based on producer-star Channing Tatum’s early experiences and directed by Steven Soderbergh, won’t play to heterosexual men—and how this may inevitably spell box-office trouble. And from the film’s marketing campaign,…
Director Timur Bekambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an awkward mash-up of historical fiction, satire and horror, couldn’t be less inspired. “History is made of legends, not men,” we learn in the opening sequences—not exactly apropos for a movie sure to be quickly forgotten. In…
A strangely affecting film that begins as a broad comedy before settling down into something sweeter, filmmaker Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend at the End of the World, about an unlikely friendship that forms as a meteor hurls toward Earth, has a surprising, beating…
What a wonderful picture Safety Not Guaranteed turns out to be—to describe it is to reduce it to its rudimentary plot points, but to see it, and witness the sensitivity and sweetness play out onscreen, is a thing of beauty. It’s a movie that…
Filmmaker Lynn Shelton’s new comic chamber piece, Your Sister’s Sister, has an uncanny ear for the dynamics between adult sisters and a firm grasp on the identity of a young man going through a period of crisis. As in her first feature, Hump Day,…