If you were to travel back to the nondescript year of 2004 in your time machine (hopefully of the hot tub variety) and tune into one of those crappy upstart TV stations (the CW in this case) you’d find a little show about a girl detective who, while solving campy mysteries, also has to deal…
Omar (Adam Bakri), a young baker living in the West Bank, has to climb a wall just to see his girlfriend Nadia (Leem Lubany), a high school student. It is not a wall that separates Israeli and Palestinian territory but one within the West Bank itself, dividing Palestinians from each other. Living in what amounts…
For eight years, fans of “300” have been wondering how the film would be followed up — could the heroic sacrifice of King Leonidas and his brave 300 Spartans be outdone? With his sophomore effort, Noam Murro (“Smart People”) says, “yeah, kinda,” with his fairly praisable sequel 300: Rise of an Empire. Keeping with the…
It isn’t likely one will recognize any members of the cast of Cement Suitcase, a film written and directed by J. Rick Castaneda (whose resume includes just a few short features, including “Math and Other Problems”). Yes, a person may have a fleeting bit of acknowledgement, but will most likely say, “Oh, he/she just looks…
Paul W.S. Anderson might just be the very avatar of filmmaking mediocrity. Starting with the legendarily bad “Mortal Kombat” adaptation and working his way up a bit from there, he’s made a living off churning out genre films not awful enough to be memorable, but just bad in enough noticeable, glaring ways to make for…
There’s not much more frustrating than a film that comes so close to being thought-provoking and perceptive, but chooses instead to focus on apathetic plights and easy solutions. The Monuments Men embodies this all too well, dangling fascinating questions just out of reach, all the while cycling through a series of genre tropes from rousing…
When it comes to tales of familial strife, movies sure love to put the fun in dysfunctional. But in the dark, depressing August: Osage County, the Weston family settles for nothing less than the whole word. There’s nothing particularly fun about this group, not when it’s just matriarch Violet (Meryl Streep) screaming at patriarch Beverly…
