With its budget said to have exceeded a whopping $200 million, James Cameron’s Titanic was the most expensive motion picture in history upon its 1997 release. During production, the cards were heavily stacked against the movie; it starred commercially unproven actors, the story was derided as a Romeo and Juliet rip-off, and the film ran…
Who knew Tarsem Singh Dhandwar had a sense of humor? Well, apparently not me. So color me pleasantly surprised that the imagery-obsessed filmmaker behind such stony-faced pictures as “The Cell” and last fall’s “Immortals” has finally revealed a different side of himself with the playful fairy tale movie Mirror Mirror. A lighthearted interpretation of the…
Though Joseph Cedar’s Footnote (original title Hearat Shulayim) is a look at the Israeli academic community’s insularity and hubris, the problems it raises are universal and the film could most likely take place anywhere in the world. One of five nominated films at this year’s Oscars in the Best Foreign Film category, Footnote allows us…
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an utter delight. Here is a satisfying comedy unafraid to have a heart and a brain, and it has no interest in toilet humor or cheap gags. It’s one for the mature crowd, as it earns lots of belly-laughs through genuine wit and doesn’t shy away from the inherent…
All good things must come to an end. In the case of The Twilight Saga, even bad things end. It’s ending, for which the first, albeit short, theatrical trailer has been released by Summit Entertainment, comes in the form of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2. I’m not a fan of the series,…
An Arab sheikh with more money than sense wants to import the sport and/or lifestyle of salmon fishing from cold and rainy Scotland to the barren desert of Yemen. In the meantime, the British government is floundering from scandal to scandal and greedily seizes upon the idea of a cultural rapprochement between the West and…
Fear in real time. That’s the most tantalizing hook the horror genre has offered since “The Blair Witch Project” opened the “found footage” floodgates more than a dozen years ago. That genre reinvention eventually led to the 2007 Spanish horror masterpiece “[Rec],” my pick for the scariest movie of the past decade. That movie was…
