The Barber is a B-movie’s B-movie. While many of the tropes those well-acquainted with this type of film have come to know are present, several of them are approached uniquely or service the plot in ways far less tired than the tropes themselves. Truer to form still is the ridiculously overdone ending, another familiar element…
The success of David Dobkin’s (“Wedding Crashers”) The Judge lies in its ability to sound just like every other story in which a successful prodigal son returns from “the big city” in the midst of personal turmoil to attend a parent’s funeral (“Elizabethtown,” “Garden State,” etc.) when summarized aloud, but play out on screen as…
The Garrett Hedlund Dilemma: How To Avoid Outlaw Clichés and Maximize Potential. Does the above text currently exist? No, not yet it doesn’t — but the world of cinema may demand it by 2015. The opening scenes of Andrew Levitas’ feature debut, Lullaby, have Mr. Hedlund mirroring the roles of “On The Road” and “Inside…
What happens when a slouch finds out he has more children than he can count on 100 hands? Well, in director Ken Scott’s world, the result is Delivery Man an underdeveloped, klutzy film that, while full of potential, evaporates quickly amid humorless scenarios and faulty acting from a cast of youngsters who are supposedly adversely…
A deft touch turns into a heavy hand in Derek Cianfrance’s big, bruised follow-up to his quietly brilliant masterwork “Blue Valentine.” His latest is a conflicted drama about fathers and sons and fate and bad decisions and maybe even ice cream. The Place Beyond the Pines is an admirably ambitious project that clobbers its themes…
The near future doesn’t look too bad. Phones are translucent and are just a sliver in thickness, you video chat through your television by voice command, cars are getting greener and smaller, and your local library will no longer maintain hard-copy volumes for you to check out. The domestic robot market is also taking off….
A second trailer for Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s Intruders has been released by Millennium Entertainment and it’s more jarring than the first that was released in May of 2011. This one somehow links a young girl and a young boy from two separate families with a ghoulish figure. What it wants and why it has locked…
