Monthly Archives: January 2013

Ever since “300,” Zack Snyder has been the darling of the Warner Bros. lot, left to try his hand at the most famous graphic novel adaptation of all (“Watchmen”) and even given a kids’ movie about talking warrior owls from … Continue reading →

The Oscar-nominated French Canadian drama “Incendies” takes us from Montreal to Lebanon as two 30ish siblings try to unravel the mystery of their mother’s life and flight from that country decades before. Not that it identifies those locales right away. … Continue reading →

A boy on a black bicycle slushes by a long line of gray-clad soldiers, pedestrians and refugees on a snowy dike-top road. It’s January of 1945, “Winter in Wartime,” and nobody has gasoline but the Germans, and the Germans are … Continue reading →

Film buffs tend to forget, with the half century or more of hoopla surrounding “Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo,” that samurai pictures were and remain the equivalent of Westerns in Japan — formula films with time-honored motifs, action beats and archetypes. … Continue reading →

“Thor,” the first summer comic book blockbuster out of the gate, has a lot of that winking wit we’ve come to expect from our post-’Spider  Man” Marvel movies. It has a hunky, self-mocking young star, solid support from a couple … Continue reading →

A good science fiction movie will let you forget it’s sci-fi , focusing on characters, their humanity and their quest. It doesn’t matter if they’re hurtling through space or time or in what universe they’re inhabiting. If the movie gets … Continue reading →

The French thriller “Point Blank” clocks in at just 84 minutes. And a leaner and meaner 84 minutes you are not likely to catch on a screen this year. Fred Cavaye’s film is a ticking clock tale with all the … Continue reading →

Take “Kick-Ass,” a film about an ordinary delusional guy who creates a costume, dons a mask and calls himself a “superhero” — albeit one without any “super” powers. Strip it of most of its wit and charm, amp up the … Continue reading →

So one isn’t considered a promising enough prospect to warrant a preview screening. And the other could do for zombies what “Twilight” did for blood-suckers — make’em young and romantic. High hopes for one, guarded fears for the other.

If ever a filmmaker had permission to let acclaim go to his head, it’s Benh Zeitlin, the 29 year old writer-director of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a no-budget neo-realist fantasy that has taken awards at Sundance and Cannes, and … Continue reading →