Dakota Johnson has such a fresh, engaging, likeable screen presence that she single-handedly manages to sublimate the impulse to rip your cinema seat out of the floor and hurl it through the screen while watching the horribly named How To Be Single, a Friday-Night-Girls-Night-Out Warner Brothers / New Line / MGM by-product that is impressively…
DetailsThis is one of those films that ends up being different than the expectations. There is much to like about The Witch, with it’s beautiful cinematography, production design, and an excellent, committed cast, but the end result is somehow not as satisfying as I would have hoped. But then, expectation can make or break one’s…
DetailsNot so much a superhero movie as a super-anti-hero movie, Deadpool follows a low-rent fixer / mercenary / goon named Wade (Ryan Reynolds) who, after being transformed into an extremely pussy, pimply, putrid version of himself (but with endlessly regenerative healing powers) by a grim British villain named Ajax (the creepily named Ed Skrein), decides his hot…
DetailsLadies and gentlemen, welcome to one of the few surprise movie releases of February. I was most certainly apprehensive about Deadpool, as the trailers seemed to be hit and miss with the humor. But, as it turns out, Deadpool is actually quite fun – and funny – which is really at the core of this…
DetailsIn the spirit of full disclosure, I was a kung fu consultant on the original Kung Fu Panda. Seems a crew member had seen my San Diego Comic Con Superhero Kung Fu Extravaganza (for which the Comedy Film Nerds have served as co-hosts the past few years) and suggested to the producer that I give…
DetailsHoly shit, this is a sweet movie! Not since Once did some Irish jerks get to me like this. I love it and I resent it. I mean, why should I have to feel all sad when I watch a movie? Or walk around after, like, “Will I ever know love, truly?” Brooklyn takes place…
DetailsAndrew Haigh’s third feature follows his second, Weekend (2011) in depicting an intimate portrait of two people in a relationship. In Weekend, that relationship was just beginning; here, it’s deep – forty-five years deep. That’s the anniversary looming at the end of the week for Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtney) and Kate’s planning a big party with…
DetailsCarol is the latest successful adaptation of the incredibly cinema-friendly fiction of Patricia Highsmith, although here her source novel, The Price of Salt, is semi-autobiography. The material has found a perfect executor in director Todd Haynes, who combines his exquisite sense of period with a very personal subversive streak, and actors Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, who both…
DetailsRomantic, moving, embracing and thoroughly old-fashioned, Brooklyn is a gorgeous film centred by a major performance by Saoirse Ronan, who is making no mistakes in fulfilling the promise she showed when she received her first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress, for Atonement, in 2007, when she was thirteen years old. Now she’s nominated for Best Actress for Brooklyn, and, were…
DetailsBrie Larson won the Golden Globe for her lead performance in Room, an audacious and inspiring film, a coherent, complex and confident blend of arthouse experimentalism, mainstream thriller and serious drama. It’s one of the best films, easily, of this “Awards Season”. Larson and Jacob Tremblay play a mother and her son living in extreme…
Details