Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is tense and unflinching. Its relentless intensity and graphic brutality has been the defining feature in the media, but it is also an essential part of the film and the primary reason it could become the most important portrait of American slavery yet on camera.
Finally tapping into the coveted “Action Movie-Goers Ages 55-64” demographic is _RED,_ the first movie to fully recognize that the bad-ass old guy is the most bad-ass bad-ass possible. For that matter, I think I am not exaggerating when I say that, by and large, the older the practitioner, the more raw the feat. I dare you to name one thing that’s not raw as hell when done by a dude or lady of years. Doing push-ups. Chopping firewood. Yelling at Koreans. Speaking to a nation. Chugging a beer.
The Major Motion Picture is, along with presidential elections and natural disasters, one of the few events still capable of giving our fragmented culture a sense of unity, brief though it may be. The buzz surrounding the release of such … Read More
The first time I saw Zero Dark Thirty left me shaken to my core, affected to an extent I rarely experience at the cinema. I was deeply moved by what I saw as a powerful meditation on obsession and revenge … Read More
KILLERS Killers stars Katherine Heigl as an attractive, blonde, and slightly manic but single and unfulfilled woman who’s all too acutely aware that her biological clock’s ticking. As if by magic, shockingly attractive man of her dreams Ashton Kutcher comes … Read More
“My first draft of this review started with a disclaimer saying that, whatever my opinions of Crazy Rich Asians may be, its all-Asian cast is worth celebrating as a landmark for representation. Then my editor sent me an article explaining how the movie’s depiction of Singapore is analogous to a depiction of America only featuring white people, and now I don’t know what to think. In the context of Hollywood’s shameful history of white actors playing Asian characters, this still feels like a step in the right direction, though it’s hard to forgive the ignorance of Singaporean racial diversity. This stuff is complicated and there are two sides to every issue. Anyway, Crazy Rich Asians is awful.”
