Elmore Leonard

Ordell Robbie (Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def) and Louis Gara (John Hawkes) get much more than they bargained for after kidnapping the wife of a corrupt real-estate developer (Tim Robbins). As it turns out, Frank Dawson has no intentions of paying the ransom for the well-being of his wife, Mickey (Jennifer Aniston). He had been seeking a way to leave his wife of many years for his mistress (Isla Fisher), and fortunately Ordell and Louis took care of the messiness of actually leaving Mickey for him by kidnapping her.

Stick Written by Elmore Leonard and Joseph Stinson Directed by Burt Reynolds USA, 1985 Part of the reason that Elmore Leonard’s novels got turned into movies so often is that it was so easy to write the screenplays. Entire scenes full of Leonard’s trademark crackling dialogue would go, verbatim, into films like Get Shorty and Out of Sight. …

With the timing of a well-orchestrated heist, the latest screen adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel closes this year’s Toronto Film Festival. Given his recent passing and the well-deserved plaudits from various luminaries of pen and screen, his rap sheet has been celebrated over the past few weeks. Based on Leonard’s novel The Switch, writer and director Daniel Schechter has managed to embezzle a fine addition to the long list of lean Leonard works. Although it doesn’t quite hit the jackpot, it does manage to purloin some fine criminal characters and a gutsy group of belly laughs to boot.

For a period of years after the release of Pulp Fiction, mainstream Hollywood developed an obsession with structure, toying with time and pacing in ways that were often interesting and occasionally grating. The late 1990s also saw the release of a variety of pretty excellent Elmore Leonard adaptations, including Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty and Quentin …

According to IMDB, close to 40 films and TV shows have Elmore Leonard’s name attached, some as creator, some as screenwriter, but about three-quarters because they’re based on one of his novels or short stories. Leonard, who died August 20 of complications following a stroke, didn’t like most of them. Actually, that’s something of an …

If cinema has anything to say about it, the modern American dream is best typified by a grandiose level of entitlement in those who covet it most of all. Just a month ago, we saw Spring Breakers, a nightmarish, neon piece of grotesquerie, compelling experimental art about nubile young women trying to attain their hedonistic Western utopia by stealing from and killing people who dared get in their way, consequences be damned.

Justified, Season Four, Episode One: “Hole in the Wall” Written by Graham Yost Directed by Michael Dinner Airs Tuesdays at 10pm ET on FX In a recent blog post summing up the joys of watching Justified, Vulture’s Matthew Zoller Seitz compared the show to Cheers – not because the shows share thematic or structural DNA, …

There is a lot to be said about writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s success as a filmmaker. His films have all been met with some degree of critical appreciation and have all made some decent money at the box office. What’s more, and this might be his true legacy, his projects have sparked the imaginations of fellow …