THE FALL GUY is big fun made better by crackerjack cast and its whimsical penchant for self-reference. Based on the vintage television series of the same name, it reboots Colt Seaver (Ryan Gosling) as a stuntman for the hottest star in Hollywood, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and madly in love with Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt),… Read More »
BARBIE
At one point in BARBIE, Greta Gerwig’s pink-plastic jab at the patriarchy, America Ferrara, as Gloria, an ordinary woman, gives an impassioned précis on exactly what women face in the current social climate. It is a clarion call that should reverberate through the ages and one that will, like the film in which it appears,… Read More »
THE NICE GUYS
Shane Black has the gift of making films that are nail-bitingly suspenseful and wickedly funny at the same time. He did it with KISS KISS BANG BANG, and he’s done it again with THE NICE GUYS, a stylishly acerbic and decidedly hard-boiled neo-Noir pitting nihilism against idealism during the candy-colored decadence of 1977 Los Angeles.… Read More »
THE BIG SHORT
If there is one point THE BIG SHORT makes, it’s that just because something has never happened before, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it can’t. And that it takes someone with the comic sensibility of co-writer Adam McKay, a director known for THE OTHER GUYS and TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE LEGEND OF RICKY BOBBY, to… Read More »
THE IDES OF MARCH
THE IDES OF MARCH is a suitably Machiavellian portrait of how politics works. Not in the bastardized sense of ruthlessness for ruthlessness sake, but rather in the classical Machiavellian sense, ruthlessness to manage any given situation in order to achieve ones goals while making as little fuss with the population at large as possible. In… Read More »
GANGSTER SQUAD
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but while GANGSTER SQUAD obviously admires Brian De Palmas THE UNTOUCHABLES, and tries very, very hard to be a variation on that classic, it does not have Mr. De Palma directing, nor does it have David Mamet writing the script. What it does have is a series… Read More »
ONLY GOD FORGIVES
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STAY
The failing of most very bad movies is that there was very little in the way of thinking that went into them. That is not the case with STAY. This overbearingly pretentious piffle has been overthought so much in its attempt to be clever and deep that rather than being engaging or mysterious or even… Read More »
FRACTURE
Hubris, as the ancient Greeks were oft wont to mull in their plays and myths, is a fatal flaw. It’s the one that the gods of those self same ancient Greeks couldn’t abide and hence, the one that got them interested in smiting the one showing it. FRACTURE is a film that would warm the… Read More »