In Cake, it takes about fifteen minutes for director Daniel Barnz to establish the ground rules for this familiar portrait of grief and addiction, followed up by another 90 minutes or so of dramatic clumsiness and eye-rolling clichés. Whether it is drugs, sex, or booze, each brings a routine numbing quality to the table for Claire Bennett (Aniston), a seemingly darkly comedic and scathing woman who we first meet in a support group for chronic physical pain.
The 21st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards Nominations were revealed Wednesday morning, serving as yet another precursor on the long road to the Oscars. In the film categories, Birdman was the big winner, scoring four nominations, including for Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and Emma Stone, as well as the collective ensemble cast. Boyhood followed right …
There’s nothing more depressing than a lazy comedy, and Horrible Bosses 2 suffers from a terminal case of laziness. Instead of gleefully diving into its richly-black premise, it settles for obvious sight gags and uninspired improvisations. A talented comedic cast is wasted on material that aims for mediocrity and hits the target over and over again. There simply aren’t enough laughs here to justify this film’s existence.
This week at the end of October is the point in the Oscar race where pundits begin spinning their wheels. The festivals are over, the critics’ awards haven’t started yet, and no new movies are arriving, leaving little to actually go on in terms of new predictions. Keep in mind, when an Oscar pundit talks …
The Hype Cycle is News Editor Brian Welk’s roundup of industry news, reviews and predictions of everything Oscar, boiled down into weekly power rankings of the buzziest and most likely contenders in this year’s awards season. This article is Part 2 of this week’s Hype Cycle column. Read Part 1 from yesterday. 7. Foxcatcher and …
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.
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.
We’re The Millers Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber Written by Bob Fisher, Steve Faber, Sean Anders, and John Morris USA, 2013 We’re The Millers is a mighty schizophrenic movie, sometimes shuffling from plot point to plot point as if you can literally see a committee of studio executives hovering next to the actors, offering notes …
The Switch Directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck Adaptation is a difficult art. Stay too faithful and you’ll wind up importing elements not appropriate to the new form, but stray too far and you’ll annoy proponents of the original. While the latter approach has probably resulted in a greater volume of good films, the …