Jurassic World is really what every summer spectacle aspires to be. It’s fleet, it wows audiences with special effects creations that are spectacular and inspired, it delivers romance and humor with the action and suspense, and it sends the audience on a fast and furious ride. It’s not an experience that necessarily sticks with you, […]
Compañeros (1970) is an ironic title, but then as a spaghetti western—a genre steeped in mercenaries and con men and double crosses—it would have to be. Swedish gun runner Yodlaf (Franco Nero), in Mexico in the heat of the revolution to sell his weapons to the highest bidder, and hot-headed Mexican peasant turned revolutionary officer […]
Arrow kicked off the DC Comics universe of TV shows on the CW network and it continues to lean toward the dark side of the genre. Anchored by Green Arrow (Stephen Amell), the masked alter ego of millionaire playboy turned brooding shipwreck survivor Oliver Queen, the show has created an entire crime fighting team around […]
I don’t know how the heist-on-wheels The Fast and the Furious speed franchise became the blockbuster action series it did, but I’m a fan. I dig these movies, enjoy the comic-book plotting and pulp characters and macho codes of brotherhood and familia, and appreciate a modern action spectacle that favors actual rubber-on-the-road stunts over CGI […]
Our Brand Is Crisis (2015), inspired by the 2005 documentary of the same name, is a political satire with an engaging cast but a dull bite. Set in the 2002, it stars Sandra Bullock as an American political consultant lured out of retirement to work on a campaign to re-elect a former Bolivian President (Joaquim […]
The signature image of Gomorrah (Italy, 2008), Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Robert Saviano’s book about the dominance of organized crime in Naples and Caserta, is a pair of teenage boys running around a deserted beach in their underwear while shooting off automatic weapons. That’s as much glamour as you can expect from this portrait of […]
Serenity (2005) – Joss Whedon’s short-lived TV series Firefly (available on Netflix and Hulu, and reviewed at Stream On Demand here) lasted a mere 14 episodes. Not nearly enough for the fans. So Whedon took it to the big screen and made a lively, humor-laden science fiction western. Nathan Fillion (Castle) is the former rebel soldier […]
The Transporter (2002) – Luc Besson, the rather pretentious yet stylish purveyor of high concept action cinema born in France, found his true niche when he created his own production company and turned into an action mogul. His pictures are generally swift and sleek and sometimes silly and he’s ably filling the gap left by […]
Juno (2007), the feel good film of the pregnant teenager comedy genre, was the success story of 2007, a low-budget comedy with an offbeat sensibility that was embraced by a youth audience and propelled into a mainstream hit. Ellen Page is impetuous and funny as the smart-mouthed high-school goofball who finds herself pregnant, the result […]
Inherent Vice (2014), Paul Thomas Anderson’s loopy take on Thomas Pynchon’s dope-infused private eye novel, earned Anderson an Oscar nomination for his ingenious screenplay adaptation and critical raves for the rich pageant of eccentrics and oddballs bouncing through 1970 Los Angeles with a post-sixties hangover. I never read Pynchon’s novel so I’ll take the word […]
