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…
With a built-in audience of mostly 14-17 year-old girls, director Gary Ross (“Pleasantville,” “Seabiscuit”) puts forth The Hunger Games — a rather faithful version of the first novel in Suzanne Collins’ best-selling trilogy, telling the tale of a post-apocalyptic North America divided into 12 districts. And with the country having gone through a rebellion years…
The poet Rilke said, “There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. Here something blooms; from out of a silent crevice an unknowing weed emerges singing into existence.” The unknowing weed takes its time to sing but sing it does in director Anh Dung Tran’s film Norwegian Wood, his first since “Vertical Ray of the…
When the media began to co-opt the sixties counter-culture’s anti-establishment message and turn it into advertising slogans and the marketing of tie-die shirts, you knew it was the beginning of the end for any serious purpose the movement may have embodied. If the Duplass Brothers’ slacker comedy, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, is any indication,…
Headhunters (directed by Morten Tyldum) is a crime thriller based on Jo Nesbo’s 2008 best seller of the same name and produced by the people that brought us the movie adaption’s of the Stieg Larsson trilogy. Don’t let that fact fool you into expecting more of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” however, as Headhunters…
Patrick Hasburgh and Stephen J. Cannell’s television drama “21 Jump Street” was notable for a couple of reasons. First, it aired on the Fox Network for 103 episodes, becoming an early hit for the fledgling broadcasting company. Secondly, it sparked Johnny Depp’s acting career. Now, a cinematical adaptation of the same name has been helmed…
In Darkness is aptly titled. This film is incredibly dark, both in a lighting sense and its subject matter. Based on the book, “In the Sewers of Lvov: a Heroic Story of Survival from the Holocaust,” In Darkness joins a long line of films which document Jewish ghettos during World War II. The story follows…
