Film

Sound City Roswell Films In a scene late in the newly released documentary Sound City, Dave Grohl, the former drummer for Nirvana, is focused. He pounds away on the drums, lost in their echoing tribal rhythm, his long black hair flying in his face. It’s almost as if he thinks finding the right combo of […]

In June 1993, I stood in line at a Northern California multiplex with my then-roommates, awaiting our showtime for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. One of them in particular had been giddy for weeks leading up to the opening, and to him the reason for such anticipation was self-evident. “Big mechanical lizards!” he would intone with […]

Provocateur: It’s such a loaded, even lazy term. Sure, it might seem to apply to Spring Breakers writer/director Harmony Korine as much as it would to any filmmaker. After all, he is the guy whose career launched as a teenager with the script for Larry Clark’s incendiary teens-in-trouble opus Kids, and whose output has included […]

Sure, I may be a film critic—but I’m also an American. I’ve got my pride in our nation’s accomplishments, and I don’t like seeing its institutions in peril. Which is why Olympus Has Fallen—about an assault by North Korean terrorists on the White House—had me muttering angrily to myself: “Why couldn’t this have been the […]

Funny—like former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s legendary line about pornography—is an “I know it when I see it” proposition. Often, nothing will kill a joke faster than trying to analyze it. But The Incredible Burt Wonderstone offers a useful teaching moment in comedy principles. And one of them is that nothing can throw an […]

What I keep hearing in my head is: Escape from Oz. I had no trouble keeping the title straight before I saw the film. But apparently the mere act of watching—and it was pretty mere—has infected me with a desire to be somewhere else, much like most movies that come out just after the Oscars. […]

This is the worst Jason Bourne movie yet. What were they thinking? Wait, what? This is supposed to be a Die Hard movie? That can’t be. It starts out all, like, CIA—shaky zooms on worried wonks in supertech control rooms on one side of the planet and an opening gambit that I swear is swiped […]

Bet as many Lincolns as you can scrape together on Daniel Day-Lewis taking Best Actor. Anne Hathaway will be carrying away a Supporting Actress gold statuette for dreaming a dream. And you can Argo to the bank on Ben Affleck’s film as a Best Picture favorite. In several 2013 Academy Award categories, the only suspense […]

Look, I’m gonna be frank here: This whole paranormal and/or apocalyptic teen romance subgenre that appears to have taken over young-adult literature, movies and the world? It needs to die—and in a way that does not permit a supernatural resurrection. Of course, there are going to be exceptions. Just a couple of weeks ago, Warm […]