Playing for Keeps: Blown Dryer
I’m not sure what convinced Gerard Butler and decision-makers in Hollywood that his best move was to start portraying brash Americans. Whatever it was,...
Hitchcock: American Psycho
Nothing in Hitchcock tops its opening sequence. After serial killer Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) murders his brother with a shovel, the camera pans to...
Killing Them Softly: Cogan’s Bluff
Andrew Dominik is at home among thieves and killers. The New Zealander has made three films, and they’ve all been crime thrillers: the terrifying...
Anna Karenina Under the Lights
Wow, this is spooky. When I was in college, I wrote a paper on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It was about the novel’s relationship...
Silver Linings: Soaring Eagles
For whatever reason, this is a banner year for movies about mental illness set in Pennsylvania. We still have the excellent Pittsburgh teen flick...
Life of Pi: Cat Away
Remember when I wrote about “unfilmable” novels in my review of Cloud Atlas a few weeks ago? Well, Yann Martell’s Life of Pi was...
Lincoln: Long Live the Union
Here we are in 2012, and Steven Spielberg is still surprising me. Because Lincoln has been released one week after a presidential election, everyone...
Sessions: The 36-Year-Old Virgin
You can get a double dose of John Hawkes this week. The 53-year-old character actor was in Fort Worth last weekend to be feted...
Skyfall: The Divine Ms. M
One thing the James Bond series has been known for is the “Bond girls,” those hot women of various ethnicities and varying degrees of...
Iron Fists: Wu, No!
Before he called himself RZA and conquered a big swath of the hip-hop world, Robert Fitzgerald Diggs was a teenager in New York, escaping...
