For his follow-up to “In Bruges” director Martin McDonagh has assembled a cast touched upon by the eccentric-comedy gods. Everything about “Seven Psychopaths” defies convention and logic, an asset that adds to the outright lunacy on display. I loved how over-the-top it is, both in its bloody violence (people set afire, heads sawed off, a sequence so dementedly funny I wouldn’t want to ruin it) and willingness to
Ben Affleck’s gradual rise from the “Gigli” debacle to alpha-director-status is doubtlessly one of Hollywood’s best comebacks. And yet, the actor-director faces his toughest challenge yet with “Argo,” out in theaters today, a fresh take on a controversial international affairs incident. Six American diplomats stuck inside Tehran during the 1979-80 events there (hostage crisis, etc.) are rescued by a CIA extraction team under the pretense that
It started with "The Ring" in 2004 but now with the new movie "Sinister," in which a ghost haunts reels of old home movies, the poltergeists are putting more of a curse on film than 3-D. Writer-director Scott Derrickson, no stranger to the horror genre after dealing with demons in "The Exorcism of Emily Rose," tries his hardest to create a mood and some jump-out-of-your-skin scares but this new haunting is a far
It was a little surprising to me that Tim Burton had never made a boy-and-his-dog story before, so much so, in fact, that I looked this up only to find that he had made “Frankenweenie” in 1984 as a live-action short film. Twenty-eight years later and you can tell that this story, now in animated form, is still a passion project. Victor (Charlie Tahan) is a lanky, dark-haired high-school loner who prefers making 8mm movies and working on
After “Battlefield Earth” who would've thought that scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard would ever be portrayed seriously in film again? “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film since 2007’s “There Will Be Blood”, does just that. It neither condemns nor justifies the religion, but centers on the fascinating struggle of two men. Joaquin Phoenix’s faux mental breakdown is over, thankfully, and he has returned to acting in
In 2005 writer-director Rian Johnson made a memorable film called “Brick” which combined the private eye-crime noir genre with a high-school setting and made us start to wonder if Joseph Gordon Levitt was going to have a career past being the alien teenager on “3rd Rock from the Sun.” Now no one is wondering anymore as Levitt teams up again with the director for “Looper,” the year’s most ingenious and thought-provoking