Search for 2013

Perhaps the most curious and counterproductive aspect of The Fifth Estate, the so-called "Wikileaks movie," is the decision by director Bill Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer to establish the film as a thriller. The material covered in the produc...

For the briefest of moments, while watching Frozen, I felt like I was back in the early '90s, experiencing one of the memorable early "second wave" of Disney animated films. The sensation passed quickly - Frozen is, after all, in 3-D and uses CGI (...

Many times, the best feature debuts come from filmmakers who explore subjects about which they have a passion. With Ryan Coogler, the fire burns for Oscar Grant, a 22-year old who was shot while in police custody during the early morning hours of N...

I confess a degree of bafflement about why Hollywood apparently considers it necessary to employ the dumbest possible screenplays for movies like this. On one level, the only significant differences between G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Transformers ar...

There seems to be little doubt that Ruben Fleischer, the director behind the well-received Zombieland and the less well-received 30 Minutes or Less, is a Brian De Palma fan. How else to explain the kinship that exists between Fleischer's latest, Ga...

Getaway is pretty much a 90-minute car chase. That's it. It may rival The Blues Brothers for the most vehicular wreckage in a motion picture. (Is that still the gold standard or has it been surpassed?) That said, however, consider how easy it is fo...

One hot summer day in 1988, I emerged from a movie theater exhilarated by what I had just experienced. The film in question was the original Die Hard, one of the best thrillers of the decade and, one could argue, an all-time Top 10 entry for the ge...

Wow. If ever there was a case to be made for 3-D as a valuable cinematic tool, Alfonso Cuaron has made it. Put alongside Avatar and Hugo (with honorable mentions going to Prometheus and Life of Pi), Gravity shows the power of 3-D when applied ...

The Great Gatsby is widely recognized as one of the best American novels of the 20th century, although many remember it as a book we were forced to read in high school. Thus far, there have been several attempts to convert the book into a movie (mo...

Back in the 1980s, when Sylvester Stallone was at his peak and the Rocky movies were arriving at regular intervals, there was an ongoing joke that, 20 or 30 years from then, Stallone would be doing Rocky 15 with the pugilist using a walker to get a...