Recent Stories
MUD
Ignore the plot holes, Matthew McConaughey charms as fugitive in coming-of-age tale.
Benefiting from a cast that includes Matthew McConaughey, Sam Shepherd and Michael Shannon, Mud is an engaging coming-of-age tale whose gaping plot holes barely matter. Writer-director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) cobbles together the story of ...
On The Road
Jack’s Back: The Beat Generation lives on in sold interpretation of classic On the Road.
Enough time has passed since Jack Kerouac shocked American literary culture with his free-verse writings that few audiences will fault the film version of On the Road for its miscasting of Sam Riley (as Kerouac’s ...
Stand Up Guys
Brothers in Arms: Stand Up Guys puts aging hitmen together in a mob bromance.
Stand Up Guys is a respectable compact crime drama comedy about camaraderie among a passing generation of retired wiseguys. There’s still some honor among thieves. Christopher Walken, Al Pacino, and Alan Arkin play the film’s ...
The Paperboy
Missed Delivery: The Paperboy plays at hardcore, to demoralizing results.
Openly anti-Semitic homophobic, misogynist and racist, there’s something to offend nearly everyone in this wrongheaded ’60s era sexploitation misadventure. Pete Dexter’s pulp novel Paris Trout – about some of the dumbest fictional characters ever imagined ...
Arbitrage
Hedging the Bet: Richard Gere embraces a handful of deadly sins as a soulless Wall Streeter in Arbitrage.
Some not-so-fancy narrative mechanics set Richard Gere up as a one-percenter antihero in a movie that deplorably attempts to mitigate the evil that wealthy corruption loves to wield at every level of social injustice. With ...
The Campaign
What’s Right?: The Campaign turns the political process red with laughter.
Here’s a new twist. Picture a Republican politician with humanitarian ethics. Now imagine said unicorn in the corporeal being of Zach Galifianakis, making the most of every effeminate gesture he can muster as small town ...
Moonrise Kingdom
Rare Vision: Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom captures youthful innocence, awakening and heart.
Wes Anderson has honed his formally composed vernacular of kitschy nostalgic magic realism cinema to a super fine point. Making his debut animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox seems to have allowed the perpetually youthful filmmaker ...
The Lucky One
Sappy Sparks: A meandering, under-developed protagonist and schmalzy score are just a few drawbacks to The Lucky One.
From a casting perspective, Zac Ephron is the ideal embodiment of vanilla American mediocrity to stand in as Logan, a politically ambiguous Iraq war vet who stalks a woman whose photo he finds on the ...
The Secret World of Arrietty
Famed Tokyo animation house takes on a classic story in The Secret World of Arrietty.
Meshing Japanese animation styles with Mary Morton’s beloved 1952 children’s novel The Borrowers, animator-cum-director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and co-director Gary Rydstrom create a delightful adaptation. Tokyo’s famed animation production house Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away) provides ample ...
The Grey
Lost in The Grey: Men battle their innermost demons while battling nature in the bleak Alaskan wilderness.
A strand of Moby Dick runs through director/co-writer Joe Carnahan’s wild and wooly tale of survival in the Alaskan wilderness. Like Moby Dick, this amorphous story is an anti-narrative made up of dark encounters with ...
