Daily Archives: October 7, 2014

“The Judge” dawdles, lingers, takes sidebars and recesses — much like a celebrity trial in which TV cameras have been allowed into the courtroom. A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, … Continue reading →

“Kill the Messenger,” the film about journalist Gary Webb’s shocking newspaper stories that connected the Reagan Era CIA to America’s crack epidemic, shows just how hard it is to film investigative journalism as a drama, and get it right. The … Continue reading →

He first gained notice in the U.S. in “The Wire,” as a detective on that seminal cops-and-drug-dealers show. In his native U.K., he’s done lots of films and TV, with “The Hour,” a melodrama set in the world of early … Continue reading →

Say this for Ryan Philippe’s “Catch Hell.” It may be a nasty, low budget exploitative genre thriller.But it’s as timely as the latest batch of stolen celebrity cell phone photos, as pointed as every Hollywood type’s nightmares about movie making … Continue reading →

“Automata” is yet another “Blade Runner” knock-off, a sci-fi dystopia about robots getting too smart for humanity’s own good on an already sun-cooked Earth. The novelty in this, which owes as much — cinematically — to “I Robot” as it … Continue reading →

Hilary “Million Dollar Baby” Swank’s latest transformative performance has her taking on the doomed descent of someone suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS is probably best-known these days as the “Ice Bucket Challenge” disease. If that’s a glib way of … Continue reading →

“Meet the Mormons” is a slick, upbeat Church of Latter Day Saints-backed documentary that aims to answer the image of the church and its members “shaped by the media and popular culture.” A quick montage of pop culture ridicule of … Continue reading →