The lack of originality isn’t The Family‘s biggest offense. Actually, there’s something cheerily familiar about its derivative premise: A mob family is on the run after Dad (Robert De Niro) turns evidence against his fellow gangsters. Their CIA agent (Tommy Lee Jones) has placed them in France—just go with it—where they move from one small […]
Ned Lannamann
Posted inCulture
Behind the Mask
The Lone Ranger is a fiasco
The parallels to Superman are uncanny: The Lone Ranger was created in the 1930s as a new kind of American hero—a fighter for all that is right and just in the world. He is a bit of a square, a bit of an anachronism, and after lapsing into irrelevance for decades, he has been rebooted […]
Posted inCulture
Crazier Than Jack
The crackpot
theories of Room 237
The Shining might be the most confounding movie Stanley Kubrick ever made. Ostensibly a horror film, the 1980 movie has its share of problems: It’s overlong, unevenly paced, uncomfortably creepy, and dramatically unsatisfying. It contains an over-the-top performance by a showboating Jack Nicholson, and an unbelievably grating one by a sniveling Shelley Duvall. But, as […]