Category: Year

  • Alpha Dog (2006)

    The murder of a 15-year-old boy at the center of Alpha Dog is rendered all the more tragic because it is so totally, utterly senseless. While the teenagers who populate the story fancy themselves as street-smart, they appear to be engaging in make-believe until it is too late – a bunch of self-styled tough guys barreling toward…

  • American Hustle (2013)

    Beginning a major Hollywood picture with a bald guy working on a comb-over isn’t the most obvious of artistic choices. American Hustle starts with Christian Bale, paunchy and fleshy and in decidedly non-Dark Knight shape, fixing his thinning hair with a watchman’s precision. He glues down a massive comb-over and maneuvers a monstrous toupee before…

  • M3GAN (2023)

    Hey, all you parents of screen-addled kids: Stay away from M3GAN. At least, that is, stay away if you don’t want to feel horribly guilty for letting computers and smartphones raise your child. This fiendishly dark horror-comedy has a lot to say about parenting and tech addiction, but such social observations are neatly ensconced in the…

  • Doubt (2008)

    Doubt came to the big screen with some seriously formidable talent behind it, but don’t be lulled into expecting pretentious High Art. Forget for a moment that it’s an adaptation of a Pulitzer- and Tony-Award winning stage play. Forget that it stars two heavyweight master thespians in Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Forget that…

  • All the King’s Men (1949)

    All the King’s Men catapulted Broderick Crawford from character actor to movie stardom, and rightly so. As fire-breathing demagogue Willie Stark, the indelible performance earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor.  His portrayal dominates the film. Adapted from Robert Penn Warren‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 novel and loosely based on the life of legendarily corrupt Louisiana…

  • Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009)

    By the late 2000s, vampire was the new black. Between the popularity of the Twilight franchise and HBO’s True Blood, bloodsucking hadn’t been this lucky since the Wall Street bailout. … Which brings us to another vampire-centric tale, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. Truncating the first three novels of Darren Shan’s YA book series,…

  • Ask the Dust (2006)

    Lest you forget that there is no sure thing, we direct your attention to Ask the Dust.  The project must have looked irresistible on paper. Its pedigree is impeccable. After all, the film is based on the 1939 quasi-autobiographical novel by John Fante, whose rabid cult following included Charles Bukowski. Ask the Dust is written and directed by…

  • Chaplin (1992)

    When Lord Richard Attenborough announced in the late 1980s his intention to make a biopic about Charlie Chaplin, the enterprise smacked of Oscar bait. Attenborough’s bloated prestige production, Gandhi, had nabbed the 1982 Academy Award for best picture, and Chaplin’s tumultuous life, peppered with scandals of sex and politics, was the stuff of epic storytelling. If Chaplin as subject…