It’s no secret that the phenomenon commonly referred to as “young adult” has taken over the movies, and it’s also no secret that the girls are kicking butt and taking names in the genre’s linchpin franchises like “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games.” Well, ladies, the boys are back front and center in The Maze Runner,…
Entering the theater to see A Walk Among the Tombstones, one might stumble and feel trapped in another cliché-ridden “Taken” in which Bryan Mills sternly promises, “I will find you, and I will kill you.” It’s an honest initial thought to have, however, once the film starts rolling, the stylish cinematography on the bleak streets…
In The Drop, Tom Hardy offers a subdued performance as a bartender in a two-bit dive that gets held up by crooks who apparently don’t realize that they’re stealing mob money. The subsequent investigation slowly stirs up old neighborhood stories and tragic secrets. Hardy’s Bob Saginowski is an area lifer; he and his cousin Marv…
It’s the beginning of the end and all bets are off in this first full trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1. It seems the masterminds behind the rebellion are willing to chew up and spit out their figurehead, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), to guarantee the uprising; President Snow (Donald Sutherland) of the…
Part live-action and part animation, Israeli director Ari Folman’s The Congress presents a sharp picture of the Hollywood of the future in which flesh and blood actors have been replaced by computer images, scanned to capture them at the most productive point of their career (technology that Folman discovered already exists). Loosely based on Stanislaw…
If you haven’t heard, Pierce Brosnan (“A Long Way Down”) is back as Agent 007 and he’s better than ever . . . well, no, actually that’s misleading and untrue. Brosnan, 61, really has returned to the spy genre, only not as Ian Fleming’s elite spy, but as Bill Granger’s ex-CIA operative Peter Devereaux in…
Suppose the ultimate version of Nostradamus was thrown onto the silver screen. Now suppose that his specialty was not simply predicting the future, but also holding and carrying the knowledge of all mankind. This is the basic premise to Phillip Noyce’s film, The Giver and Jeff Bridges (“True Grit”) plays this mix of political adviser,…
