Big Screen
Gnarly: difficult, dangerous, or challenging. The challenge of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales? To make poor old Johnny Depp appealing again. Annnnd...nope. The difficulty of Baywatch: to make a successful R-rated …
If Part Two is a sequel and Part Three a threequel, what term describes a film franchise’s fourth installment? Four-Shit would be a fitting brand, seeing as most of them are, but my editor will …
Not unlike an actual Grateful Dead concert, Amir Bar-Lev’s candid Dead doc Long Strange Trip plays one night only — Thursday, May 25 — and runs just slightly over four hours. My initial interest in …
I’m probably more fascinated by H.R. Giger and his xenomorph than is entirely healthy, so it took me a little while to get over the fact that the aliens aren’t really the star, or even …
Obit, Vanessa Gould’s documentary look at the obituary department of the New York Times in action, is as deceptive in tone as it is perceptive in vision. A strange air of calm rumination pervades the …
In case my review of the (don’t call it quirky, don’t call it quirky) quirky psycho-thriller Buster’s Mal Heart didn’t fully convey it, I want to further express my delight at the film’s portrayal of …
There’s been an ugly trend of late where Oscar-winning actresses who have been out of the limelight for some time return to play flamboyantly kooky mother figures. Jane Fonda did it twice (Monster-In-Law, Georgia Rule) …
Doug Liman’s The Wall pits two American soldiers (John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the latter looking like Jake Gyllenhaal and talking like Casey Affleck and acquitting himself admirably) against an Iraqi sniper in the pipelined, …
“You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you …
“Stub me,” I asked while stopping to split my ticket with the usher on duty at Reading Cinemas Grossmont Center. My left hand was preoccupied with notebook and silo of Coke, so I extended my …
Terence Davies’s slow and sumptuous A Quiet Passion turns the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (played mostly and hauntedly by Cynthia Nixon) into an unenthusiastic but unshakable martyr for her sex. It’s not that she …
Uh-oh. You’ve got America’s Most Beloved Actor (TM) Tom Hanks plus Emma Watson, the star of 2017’s biggest hit (Beauty and the Beast), in a techno-thriller designed to push everyone’s buttons about the companies whose …
Halfway through the trailer for Unforgettable, a warning voice began yelling in my ear: Oh no... it can’t be... SOMEONE WENT AND BUDGETED ANOTHER KATHERINE HEIGL PICTURE! It’s been two years since Heigl’s appeared in …
The San Diego Film Foundation, best known for putting on the San Diego Film Festival, will present special screenings of Storied Streets at five area schools. Documentarian Jack Henry Robbins’s Storied Streets explores homelessness through …
Have you forgotten that the Katherine Heigl crazy-ex thriller Unforgettable opens today? Probably not, because you probably never knew it in the first place. Hey-o! But here’s what’s really unforgettable: Scott Marks liked it. Full …
This was the first time James Cromwell and I have spoken, but it wasn’t the first time I was in his presence. Starting at age 13, my family began making semi-regular visits to Los Angeles …