Anyone who has read my review for 2010’s misfire, “Jonah Hex,” knows that I love genre-mashing. I adore it especially if it’s something being meshed with a Western. Now imagine my glee when I heard Cowboys & Aliens being announced. Then came out that Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, and Paul Dano…
Last summer, Will Gluck’s Easy A was one of my biggest surprises of the year. When I saw the trailer, I didn’t realize that it would be a whip-smart satire of high school and high school films. Gluck’s newest film, Friends with Benefits, may not rise to the heights of his debut, but it shows…
Written and directed by David Michôd (making his feature-length debut), Animal Kingdom persuasively demonstrates that plenty of life still remains in the contemporary Australian film industry. Fundamentally the Australian Goodfellas in the suburbs of Melbourne, it ostensibly looks as if Animal Kingdom was specifically produced to capitalize on the recent success of the acclaimed TV…
Anyone who has gone to high school in the U.S. remembers those lectures about the American Dream, but never has someone mentioned Captain America, a man who epitomizes it. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1941, Captain America became the comic-book world’s most nationalistic superhero. And though the serial was meant as a…
Prior to my screening of Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall’s Winnie the Pooh, an adaptation of the beloved A.A. Milne and Ernest Shepard books, a military recruitment ad (complete with tattooed musclemen who, cradling monstrous rifles, ran through enemy-fire, barking orders) terrified the young audience made up of rampageous toddlers that parents had brought…
Only in the movies. Only in the movies will an unemployed stammering fool be found dating a supermodel (“Transformers: Dark of the Moon“). Only in the movies will an underemployed fat guy be found dating a model and ultimately have two beautiful women fawning for him. This particular movie is Zookeeper. The fat guy is…
They say war is hell, and this age-old cliché has been exemplified in pretty much every war picture to date. 2008’s Outpost is a film which literalizes this adage, incorporating the horrors of war into a traditional horror picture. Every now and again, a small-time, low-budget horror film comes out of nowhere to catch genre…
