As Iron Man 2 begins, Tony Stark — mechanical genius, Forbes 400 perennial, the pop-star CEO of Stark Industries — has dropped any pretense of a secret identity. Stark is garishly “out” as Iron Man, performing a one-man air show before touching down to host his Stark Expo, which transforms…
More than 225 people packed the Harkins Valley Art Theatre on Friday, April 30, for the sold-out premiere screening of the documentary 9500 Liberty and a Q&A session with co-director Eric Byler. The film chronicles the heated battle over an Immigration Resolution (drafted by the same folks who brought us…
Ken Rotcop is a Hollywood legend. If you haven’t heard of him before, that’s because most of his 40+ years in the movie and television industries have been spent behind the scenes, writing for game shows and television series’ and heading up four film studios including Embassy Pictures and Hanna-Barbera. He also supervised production…
I took the 6-year-old who lives in my house to the Sunday-afternoon sneak preview of Furry Vengeance. The boy’s a savvy consumer of popular culture for kids — my greatest parenting triumph thus far. He knew from the myriad Disney Channel commercials (the movie stars Matt Prokop of High School…
Writer Andy Diggle dedicated his snappy DC comic books “The Losers” to ’80s screenwriting superstar Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon series. But in adapting “The Losers” for film, director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and…
Kick-Ass, the Matthew Vaughn-directed adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s graphic novel, sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenage mind. Tired of being mugged by high school thugs in a Manhattan that’s notably scummier than the real thing, our hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, a…
“We are not these people! We are a boring couple from New Jersey!” complains Claire Foster (Tina Fey) to her husband, Phil (Steve Carell), about halfway through Date Night, the latest high-gloss, middle-to-low-brow would-be blockbuster from director Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen, Just Married). Phil and Claire are middle-class,…
The script, costumes, and props of The Last Song work hard to establish Miley Cyrus’ dramatic-role bona fides as the 17-year-old crosses over from G to PG: Her character, constantly sneering high school grad Ronnie Miller, sports a tiny nose stud, stomps on the beach in Doc Martens, believes meat…
A contemporary crime drama edged with Greek tragedy, Ajami is an untidy, despairing, oddly exhilarating joint venture by writer-directors Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Though its unwieldy cast and multiple storylines might better lend themselves to a television series, the movie teems with life,…
‘Price was twelve, bruh.’ ‘Say bruh. Them twelve hundred was for eight pieces.’ A deal’s going down, yeah. But not the sort we’re used to witnessing between black men on a television show set in an American city. Certainly not a David Simon drama on HBO. Yet before even a…
Lost boy John Hughes was inducted into the pantheon this month when the Academy devoted a moving Oscar-night tribute to the departed writer-director. But do you actually remember being a teenage moviegoer in the 1980s? It wasn’t all some kind of wonderful. Hughes movies came out twice a year, if…
Noah Baumbach talks about his new film, Greenberg, the DIY ethos, and learning to drive. Noah Baumbach is 40 years old. He just learned how to drive. A native New Yorker, the writer/director started spending time in Los Angeles when dating his current wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, but for years…
The tagline for the recently concluded 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival was “Tomorrow Happens Here,” slick marketing shorthand for the event’s reputation as a test tube for new cinematic trends and a breeding ground for incestuous indie collaborations (most of the filmmakers now associated with mumblecore first met each…
Sad, funny, and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine were common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist — I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous…
There’s an obvious stunt element to the casting of The Runaways: a punked-up, barely legal Kristen Stewart and a still-underage, barely dressed Dakota Fanning begging for street cred by playing dress-up as, respectively, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, front girls of the oversexed ’70s-era teen proto-punk sensation The Runaways. Watch…
Better late than never — a bang-bang pulse-pounder predicated on the Bush administration’s deliberate fabrication of WMD in Iraq. Paul Greengrass’ expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal’s shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something…
Agreeing at the insistence of a Corsican mob boss to suck and then slash a fellow inmate, newly jailed Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) — poor, illiterate, a “dirty Arab” in the prison’s racist pecking order — gets what’s coming to him, but in a good way. Indeed, crime pays…
All that remains of Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day is Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning performance, his baddest and best. The rest of the movie? A blustering stumble toward parody — an overwrought, operatic buddy-cop flip-flop also starring Ethan Hawke as the rookie put to the test again and again by the devil…
Walt Disney mulled an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for decades before producing an animated feature in 1951, although by all accounts, he didn’t much care for the prim little protagonist, let alone her supporting cast of “weird characters.” One wonders what Uncle Walt would have made of his studio’s…
Cop Out establishes its movie lineage right away, with a slow-motion toe-to-head tilt up, set to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn,” of black cop/white cop buddies Jimmy and Paul swaggering stone-faced toward the camera. Director/editor Kevin Smith (who notably didn’t write the Cop Out script; this is the…
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby’s parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory…
Because they’re crafted outside the Hollywood system, you might assume that this year’s Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts stand in sharp defiance to conventional mainstream cinema. But the best of these 10 entries are, in some ways, the most familiar — their most radical element being that they operate in…
