Yearly Archives: 2013

Irish police sergeant Gerry Boyle may be “the last of the independents.” But this boozy, bluff and blunt redhead sure is a hard man t’love. He’s a racist — or at least is very comfortable coming off that way. For … Continue reading →

In a remote snowy forest in the far north, a figure in camouflage stalks a reindeer with bow and arrow. An arrow flies, the deer tumbles off across a lake to die an agonizing death. But the hunter, a teenage … Continue reading →

One of the demons is wearing what looks like a Darth Maul Halloween mask. And the finale is both a tad too literal and a lot too long and drawn out. But that doesn’t spoil what is, without a doubt, … Continue reading →

One brother’s a school teacher who struggles to keep home and family together in hard economic times. The other’s a brooding brute, home from the war, living with his long-estranged father. Both grown men have daddy issues, issues hinted at … Continue reading →

Snippets of Ron Howard’s upcoming Formula 1 racing film “Rush,” about the James Hunt/Niki Lauda rivalry during the sport’s last Golden Age, had me hankering to re-watch the movie it will be compared to — John Frankenheimer’s 1966 SuperPanavision epic, … Continue reading →

  In those heady days after “The Messenger,” director Oren Moverman, Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster cooked up what seems — on paper– like a sure Oscar nomination for Harrelson. He’d star in a “Training Day” character study of a … Continue reading →

  Before he was Mad Eye Moody, before he took Colin Farrell to the woodshed “In Bruges,” before “The Guard,” the great Irish actor Brendan Gleeson was the infamous Irish crook known as “The General.” Director John Boorman cast Gleeson … Continue reading →

The British food critic/chef and TV personality Nigel Slater’s memoir is the subject of “Toast,”an oddly under-motivated biographical account of a boys’ love of his culinarily hapless mother and his war with the woman who would replace her in his … Continue reading →

The odd, opportunistic and eccentric programming of Netflix streaming, the way the service lumps genres together and serves up possibilities, means that you’re always stumbling across something odd and old, or new and surprising — a movie you haven’t seen … Continue reading →

And “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “Identity” and so many other films. He’s been around for years and years, and every now and then I’m flipping the dial and there he is in another film that I hadn’t realized he … Continue reading →