Many of cinema’s most divisive filmmakers are accused of betraying the story they’re trying to tell by utilizing various stylistic affectations. Of course, this is true of all forms of art; those who choose to break away from established formula are often ridiculed for doing so. Wes Anderson,…
Julia Roberts hasn’t been the centerpiece of a film since the moderate success Mona Lisa Smile six years ago. Distracted by kids, a new husband, and a brief foray on Broadway, Roberts has chosen her projects carefully, a rewarding decision on her part. She has, however, been steadily…
Everlasting it may not be, but, at 131 minutes, Jan Troell’s new Swedish melodrama isn’t exactly short. It plods, and it does so while telling an all-too familiar story of turbulent marital relations. Set in the Sweden of a century ago, Everlasting Moments depicts several years in the…
When you try to conjure up an image of the holocaust, what comes to mind? Maybe Schindler’s List, The Pianist, The Diary of Anne Frank, and so on — there’s a good number of highly acclaimed dramatizations of the period, but they usually all tell a similar but…
Notorious gushes with admiration for a man who was unjustly taken from the world way before his time. Writers Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker deliver a screenplay clearly meant to honor the memory of the iconic hip hop artist known as The Notorious B.I.G., while director…
David Fincher has always enjoyed taking on pretty extreme, often ambitious projects. He adapted Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, a mind-bending thriller about secret underground organizations that beat the hell out of each other. And he put together an engrossing, epic procedural based on the serial killings in…