The Weinstein Company

(This review is dedicated to my cat Fyarl, who never failed to show my family and me he loved us. Your health problems are no more; rest easy, kittyboy.) The biggest problem with Leap! (the revised version of last year’s European release Ballerina) is it tries a little too hard for my liking. At times, […]

I’m in a weird spot with The Hateful Eight, as it’s a beautiful, ugly, crass, vulgar, thrilling, suspenseful, and nigh uncomfortable film to sit through. The film’s greatest achievement is holding an uneasy tension until the “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” credit shows up at the end, and that’s not a simple task, given […]

Outstanding performances from Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams and promising youngster Oona Laurence land an emotional wallop in director Antoine Fuqua’s boxing drama, from a solid script by “Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter. Gyllenhaal plays undefeated light heavyweight champ Billy Hope, a Hell’s Kitchen orphanage raised success story happily married to childhood soul […]

At first glance, a film like The Imitation Game could be taken as an “inflight movie,” my term for a type of film you’d see on those popdown screens when you fly more than 4 hours with any major airline carrier. It’s a period piece, very character-centric, with nothing visually or aurally offensive – a […]

‘Tis the season for biopics: thus far, they’ve ranged from unreasonably icy Oscar fodder (“Foxcatcher”) to deep, ruminative Oscar fodder (“Wild”) to BBC TV movie-of-the-week style Oscar fodder (though “Theory of Everything” does boast nod-worthy performances from Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones). While “The Imitation Game” might appear by-the-numbers both figuratively and literally, the story is one that […]

Of all the problems with “The Giver”, its biggest might just be the timing. Though Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel preceded the “Hunger Games” and “Divergent” phenomena by over a decade, director Phillip Noyce’s big screen adaptation of it feels pretty late to the party in the wake of these recent and more popular young adult […]