Nothing says “Happy Holidays” like a horror film, right?! Damn right! And when it comes from the delightfully twisted mind of writer/director Michael Dougherty, well, you’re in for some fun. Dougherty is the genius behind the film Trick r Treat, and the co-writing of X-Men 2, and the upcoming X-Men Apocalypse. Before that, he did…
I don’t have many funny things to say about this film because it was pretty great. But feel free to read it while listening to Mambo No. 5 by Lou Bega. I didn’t make the review rhyme but it should still be good for a giggle. There are lots of reasons to make a movie.…
Stephen Frears knows how to make movies. Check out this selection from his CV: My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, High Fidelity, The Queen and Philomena. If you can’t find something there to love, you don’t appreciate cinema. His ferocious portrait of Lance Armstrong’s doping program is as cold…
Clearly building a foundation for a franchise that can live forever, Creed sees Rocky Balboa training the son of his former opponent Apollo Creed to follow in his father’s footsteps – that is, into the professional ring. It’s got a terrific fight at the end, and all the proceeding stuff is professional and clear, while never being…
I watch Grave Of The Vampire every couple of years—it’s one of only a handful of movies I’ve watched over and over. Occasionally, you go back to movie that you loved as a kid, and realize how little you knew about filmmaking. When I revisited “Frogs,” one of the slew of 1970’s man vs. nature…
Absolutely Anything is Terry Jones’ first feature screenplay (written here with 65 year old Gavin Scott) since Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in 1996 and before that, Erik The Viking in 1989. Those are also the last two features he’s directed. These yawning gaps present themselves in the form of horrendously stale jokes and awfully pedestrian – bordering on ameteurish –…
In 2010, I wrote of El Secreto De Sus Ojos, “It is a superb film, an incredibly rich and moving crime thriller telling a story both in the present and twenty-five years in the past, utilising the streets of Buenos Aires to maximum effect and deploying some of Argentina’s finest actors … [It] transcends its crime-novel beginnings…
If you don’t like your movies to celebrate criminals, avoid Legend, which treats London’s notorious Kray twins as if they were tragic heroes. Which should be pretty obvious by the title. In yet another stroke of awesome acting, Tom Hardy plays both twins, Reggie and Ronnie, and he does it so well that you seriously do forget…
Oscar-winning doco maker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has made a revealing and sweet film about Malala Yousafzai and her dad Ziauddin, which can’t help but be thirty percent or so more resonant seen in the week of the Paris attacks. Malala was shot in the face by the Taliban as Paris has metaphorically been shot in…
Simon Pegg is a talented and successful man of the movies. Besides Spaced and “the Cornetto trilogy” of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End – his almost always excellent collaborations with writer / director Edgar Wright – and his occupation of second-tier funnyman in the Mission Impossible, Star Trek and (new) Star Wars franchises, he’s also a seriously well-endowed screenwriter, including…