Cinemascoping

Paramount Pictures has been very aggressive in promoting Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, moving it forward from its original Christmas Day release date and having much of the advanced publicity focusing on a stunt that finds franchise star Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a plane as it takes off and reaches an altitude of […]

What makes Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy so remarkable – and ultimately so devastating – is the vast number of video resources the filmmaker is able to pull from in order to construct this powerful portrait of pop singer Amy Winehouse.  Drawing from home movies, videos of club dates, concert footage, interviews and personal digital files, […]

The premiere of Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl at this year’s Sundance Film Festival proved once more that, as with most things in life, timing is everything.  This quirky dramedy about an emotionally stunted teenager, his only friend and the girl they befriend, who’s been diagnosed with leukemia, struck a chord […]

Never before has the phrase “Everything old, is new again,” been more prevalent at the movies than it is right now. This year alone has seen the return of Mad Max and the latest installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, while the Fantastic Four will be given another go and a new Vacation movie is in […]

Director Rick Famuyiwa has made no bones about the fact that his latest feature, Dope, is based on the Tom Cruise coming-of-age classic Risky Business. Like Joel Goodsen in that film, his hero is also at the crossroads of his life, finds himself immersed in illegal activities and falls for a girl who is out of […]

Patriotism is a hard thing to convey on the screen. One degree too much in either direction, and your film can come off as overtly political or insincere. Boaz Yakin’s Max makes no bones about its intent — it’s an enthusiastic flag-waver from the very first frame, a shameless tribute to our boys serving on foreign […]

 To say that Thomas Haden Church is enthusiastic about his new film Max is an understatement akin to saying the dogs in the movie worked kinda hard.  A familiar face on TV and in movies for nearly three decades, the actor has gone out of his way to play a wide variety of roles, from the befuddled […]

What makes Melissa McCarthy’s such an effective comedienne is her two-pronged attack where getting laughs are concerned.  One the one hand, she can be the sweet, not-so-confident bumbler who never met a social situation she couldn’t botch, whose good intentions fail to hide the fact that she’s the sort of woman who’ll always be a […]

If good intentions were all that was necessary in making a good movie, Brad Bird’s “Tomorrowland” would be considered an instant classic.  As written by Damon Lindelof and the director, the film is an earnest plea for the renewal of the sort of national optimism that fueled the space race, an unabashedly optimistic look at […]

Unlike the unwanted, supernatural characters at its core, director Gil Kenan’s Poltergeist does not overstay its welcome.  Playing somewhat like a Cliff’s Notes version of the Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg classic, this re-do recreates, and sometimes improves upon, the many iconic moments from the 1982 feature, wasting little time to deliver one round after another of […]

Since giving up on California politics, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return to the big screen has failed to generate the sort of box office success his earlier work had.  Cameos in Sylvester Stallone’s geriatric action franchise The Expendables and features such as The Last Stand and Escape Plan failed to break any new ground where his persona […]

During its first weekend in release, Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul’s The D Train made $447, 524 at 1,009 locations.  That breaks down to $444 per screen. This is no surprise as the film contains no superheroes or aliens and deals with flawed characters wrestling with genuine emotional issues. Yep, box office poison and yet […]