Relativity Media
It would seem impossible that 2001’s disposable street racing flick “The Fast and the Furious” would have spawned a box office juggernaut franchise such as this, the most recent installment costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 million, and finding its characters now in a dimension where being a gear head somehow qualifies you to […]
Read More
The more I think about Hector and the Search for Happiness, the more I find myself thinking about how good it is. On the surface, it looks like it’s only about a man in search of a catharsis or emotional reckoning, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a story about a boy learning […]
Read More
Director Roger Donaldson seems to have a lot of movies in his filmography about a mentor and his protégé, only to have said protégé either flake out or flat-out turn on his mentor. No Way Out, Cocktail, The Recruit, and now The November Man. In addition to this cliché, this film seems to sport every […]
Read More
What do you get when you mix a feel-good family drama, an offbeat comedy and an action thriller with a terminally ill lead character? If it’s written by Luc Besson and directed by McG, you get a film so bad, so utterly preposterous, that it’s kinda sorta entertaining. Well, at least some of the time. […]
Read More
I often gripe – probably too much – about films in which the characters are not adequately developed. Such is not the case with “Out of the Furnace”, the new film from director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”), though I suppose it would be hard for a filmmaker to come up empty with the likes of […]
Read More
“Rush”, which follows the real-life rivalry of Formula One drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda during their rise to stardom in the mid-‘70s, is almost the perfect balance between a big budget racing movie and observant, character-driven indie picture. While it might not reinvent the wheel, so to speak, this exceptionally cast, beautifully lensed film, […]
Read More
(Note: This review was originally published on April 18th, 2013 at Reel Film News) Even though it takes place on a demolished Earth some 60 years in the future, “Oblivion” manages to be far more beautiful than bleak. With the grand spectacle of our abandoned planet as a backdrop, there’s never too little to marvel […]
Read More
(This review originally appeared at Reel Film News on February 28, 2013.) Going into a movie like 21 and Over, which has been hyped as being from the writers of The Hangover, it’s obvious that you’re not going in to see a substance abuse movie like Leaving Las Vegas or Permanent Midnight. You’re there to […]
Read More
(This review was originally published on December 24, 2012 at Reel Film News) It doesn’t require a love of the theatre – or necessarily even a like of it – to be completely consumed by this adaptation of “Les Misérables”, which is the most moving piece of musical cinema I’ve seen in some time. By […]
Read More
(This review was originally published on January 22, 2012 at The Rogers Revue) It’s nice to see an action film that doesn’t complicate things just for the sake of looking smart. As much as I enjoyed most of the spy films from 2011, we saw almost every variation and mind-boggling complexity that the genre had […]
Read More