Monthly Archives: January 2013

The first good movie of the new year happens to be a “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.” “Beastly” is a high school non-musical updating of “Beauty and the Beast. Witty, warm, well-cast and often wickedly … Continue reading →

The back story to Disney’s Brad Bird film “1952” is that there was this fanciful, predict-the-future box of plans, notes, etc. from Walt Disney that had that year scribbled on its lid which Disney folks found after his death. George … Continue reading →

Steven Soderbergh’s retiring. There’s no getting around it. But people like me keep asking those who work with the director what they’re doing to talk him out of it. Matt Damon, an old Soderbergh pal and collaborator, said “If you … Continue reading →

Not every senior citizen passes his or her autumn years in dignity, surrounded by family, respected by the few peers they still have left in this world. And if the retirees in question are grizzled mobsters, old “made men” who … Continue reading →

There are monsters who wander the halls of our schools, selecting victims, destroying lives. We call them bullies. And they’re the real beasts of Matt Reeves’ “Let Me In,” his bloody, almost note-for-note remake of the Swedish tween vampire hit, … Continue reading →

You have to remind yourself to breathe.  It’s not that you’re literally stuck, in a coffin, with Ryan Reynolds for the 90 minutes that he’s “Buried.”  But this everybody’s-worst-nightmare thriller makes feel that you are. “Buried” works on you that … Continue reading →

Sly Stallone still has a few miles left in the tank as far as this career second wind goes. An action picture shipped to the first weekend in February tells you it’s not that many miles — outside of his … Continue reading →

It’s set in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, this story of a rule-breaking British society woman, Lady Hester Stanhope, who traveled near and far, and stuck her nose in Napoleon’s incursions in the Middle East, kept calm and carried … Continue reading →