Movie Reviews
See the job, do the job. Shoot a Glock, punch the clock. Based on a true-life, precinct-clearing scandal that rocked the Philippines, On the Job tells the story of high-ranking politicians who employed the services …
You can’t choose your family,” goes the old saying. You Will Be My Son tells the story of what may happen when you try. It’s not a surprising story, but it is a satisfying one. …
Destin Cretton’s award-winning Sundance short film, Short Term 12, gets a feature-length expansion.
Matthew Lickona: How did you pitch this film? Jill Soloway: A mom rescues a stripper and realizes that she’s the one who needs rescuing. ML: So Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) is the mom in that sentence, …
What’s this? An intelligent, paranoid suspense thriller with no bullets fired, zero special effects, two sizzling romantic leads who don’t kiss (let alone hit the sheets), and the good sense to pack a tripod?! Summer’s …
Ah, raised stakes. Is there any movie you can’t weaken, even as you seek to ratchet up the significance and tension of the crisis at hand? My top-of-the-head answer for favorite film of Summer 2013 …
Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), an African-American man born into a family of sharecroppers and schooled in the art of “knowing he’s black,” spends 34 years of his life in domestic servitude under seven presidents. While …
Films about missing children are as common today as unmotivated camera movements. Shake a cable box and at any given time you’re bound to find a couple. Few are about adult children and even fewer …
Everything you always wanted to know about honeybees but never thought to ask is answered in the sweet documentary More than Honey. Who knew that one-third of what we eat would not exist without these …
Interview with Grossmont College’s Raul Sandelin, who is near completion of the film A Box Full of Rocks: The El Cajon Years of Lester Bangs. Sandlein: "I'm an El Cajon cheerleader."
Jean-Pierre Grumbach’s (Melville was the French filmmaker’s nom de guerre, appropriated in honor of his literary correlate, Herman) acutely minimalist take on American gangster films resulted in a formal probity unlike anything cinema has experienced …
Hey, did you hear the one about how the foreign market now accounts for 75 percent of the take on big studio releases? How ’bout the one where China, Japan, and the U.K. are the …
The list of things that are terrible about The Lone Ranger is long. Reading a complete version might take longer than the film itself (a murderous 2 hours and 20 minutes). It might also be …
Everybody loves Mike and Sully, the scaresome monster team from Monsters, Inc. So, maybe they’ll be happy to see them again as college students in Monsters University. So happy that they won’t mind the clichéd …
Look! Up on the screen! It’s absurd! It’s inane! It’s Snyder’s Man! Zack Snyder sucker-punches Richard Lester’s Superman II to date Hollywood’s final say on how to film a comic book. Credit the man of …
A monumental achievement in cinema-as-time-travel. Writer, director Julien Temple (Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury) and his frequent editor, Caroline Richards, availed themselves of the opportunity to boil down 800 hours of sparklingly restored …