Search for 2013

Nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, especially when a director tweaks it and plays with it. With Nebraska, Alexander Payne, working from a screenplay credited to Bob Nelson, targets a very specific slice of Americana that has often been romanticize...

With Now You See Me, director Louis Leterrier has taken a page out of the book of his characters: use sleight-of-hand so viewers are distracted from some rather obvious screenplay deficiencies. By employing a fast-moving, high-energy approach that...

Nymphomaniac Volume I is possibly the best movie Lars von Trier has made since Dancer in the Dark. It doesn’t take much analysis to determine the “why” of this statement - for Nymphomaniac, the iconoclast director has dialed back the pretent...

Nymphomaniac Volume II, the continuation of the story begun by writer/director Lars von Trier in Nymphomaniac Volume I, is a clear case of a narrative running out of steam. Exhaustingly repetitive, this movie attempts many of the same things its pr...

We don't get many idea-based science fiction films these days so, when one comes along, it represents a welcome change of pace from the fantasy space opera that has co-opted the genre. Despite being tarted up with enough action to stave off boredom...

For a horror movie, Oculus is surprisingly lean on the scares. It's more interested in playing tricks with perception and bending reality. Ambitious material for director/editor Mike Flanagan (expanding from his award-winning short) and, if he does...

Sometimes I don't understand the Hollywood mindset. Who thought remaking Park Chan-wook's 2003 cult classic, Oldboy, was a good idea? Because of the story's sheer perversity, there's no possible mainstream appeal in this new interpretation. The mov...

There's irony to be found in the recognition that the best Die Hard to be released in 2013 isn't the franchise's official entry, A Good Day to Die Hard, but the White House-based copycat, Olympus Has Fallen. And, while Gerard Butler is no Bruce Wil...

Steel, once a bulwark of American industrial might, was transformed over a short span of decades from a thriving commercial enterprise into a fossilized shell of its glory days. Once an engine of prosperity and a provider of reliable employment, it...