Some years ago I learned 1930s and ’40s era gangsters learned to talk “gangster” from the motion pictures. James Cagney probably had more to do with coining gangster lingo and slang than John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, and Al Capone combined. Gangster Squad gets the clothes right, does a decent job with 1949 era Los…
Spring break has been known to get out of control. For four bored bikini-clad college girls — Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine — the craziness comes in the form of robbing convenience stores to keep the party going. That is until a corn-rowed drug dealer (a hyped up James Franco) gets…
A cinematic peek behind the curtain of the raid that ended with Osama Bin Laden’s assassination in May 2011 is certainly an intriguing hook for a movie, but it’s far from the whole story that unfolds in Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, taut thriller Zero Dark Thirty. Achieving intimacy in this gigantic narrative about a decade-long manhunt…
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards knew each other as children, but the more appealing version of their later meeting on the Dartford Railway opens Not Fade Away. Mick has a stack of vinyl R&B LPs on his lap which Keith takes an active interest in and so began the Rolling Stones. This vignette also launches…
Highly influential, passionately inspired, and awfully long-winded, Quentin Tarantino has amassed a filmography that is soaked in self-indulgence. He’s made some great movies regardless, but I find myself now exhausted by his work, even if at times I’m thrilled and engaged. The experience of watching a Tarantino movie tends to be a scattered one, pieces…
Though director Yaron Zilberman’s first feature A Late Quartet often looks like another episode of “As the World Turns,” or perhaps more apropos, “The Young and the Restless,” its nuanced performances are always dignified and deeply affecting and its look at the discipline it takes to become a successful music group, classical or otherwise, is…
From the page to the stage to the screen, it’s been quite the journey for Les Misérables. Once Victor Hugo’s novel, then Cameron Mackintosh’s stage musical, and now Tom Hooper’s movie, the beloved tale of lives in the gutters of 19th century France hits the big screen in musical form looking, well, almost identical to…
