Love hurts/stinks/uplifts: message clear as mud. His name is Mud. And his name is pretty much mud. And the movie is MUD. Now isn’t that convenient?! But MUD is not about Mud. He’s just a device to drive the story of young Ellis, who learns hard life lessons upon meeting him. Ellis is 16-year-old Tye Sheridan, and this movie belongs … Read More
KILLING THEM SOFTLY
The Capitalism of Killing. KILLING THEM SOFTLY opens with scarring sound design and disturbing images of debris-strewn streets, and then launches into the poetry of small time hood-speak. (Mobalogue? Gangsternacular?) Writer-director Andrew Dominik (ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES, 2007) approaches an excellence in his writing and direction that is the closest thing to Tarantino without actually lazily copying him, as this … Read More
STEALTH
Top Dumb. Uninvolving tale of a hi-tech artificial intelligence warplane that threatens to make human pilots redundant. STEALTH stars Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx as the three top gun pilots the robot plane may potentially replace. Ironically, in this movie, they all act like robots. Part of a secret military project (is there any other kind?), overseen by … Read More
BROTHERS
Broham Interruptus. Don’t you just hate it when your brother goes off to war and he supposedly gets killed, and you start putting the moves on his wife, and then he comes back? Don’t you just hate that?! What separates Jim Sheridan‘s BROTHERS from Michael Bay’s PEARL HARBOR (same plot, different war) is that BROTHERS is watchable. Starring Tobey Maguire … Read More
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
The Shooting of an Olde Worlde Epic by a New World Filmmaker. This classical western draws us into 1800s Americana so richly that we feel our teeth rotting from lack of dentistry not invented yet. Written and directed by Andrew Dominik (from a book by Ron Hansen), THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD is a study … Read More