Category Archives: Reviews

I’m a big fan of Scott Saul’s pretty-much definitive new biography of the late/great and deeply messed up comic Richard Pryor. Saul himself credits the passage of time for a lot of the access he got to Pryor’s friends, family … Continue reading →

Cameron Crowe fans — and that includes most movie critics — have cut him a lot of slack over the years. Our love for “Say Anything,””Almost Famous” and “Jerry Maguire” made us embrace the big romantic gestures and little traces … Continue reading →

Disaster movies, which pre-date the zeitgeist’s fascination with a world falling apart around us, are always great measures of the state of the Hollywood art of special effects. In “San Andreas,” you will believe the ground is rippling under Los … Continue reading →

Steve Allen’s famous equation, “Tragedy plus time equals comedy” is seriously stretched in “The Farewell Party,” a darker-than-dark Israeli comedy about old people seeking “death with dignity.” The deaths are sad, gripping affairs, the terminally ill and terminally old seeking … Continue reading →

A sequel and a reboot dominate the box office. One’s controversial, in some quarters. The other isn’t. Both are two hours long. Only one of them can justify that length. “Mad Max: Fury Road,” offers a seriously feminist twist on … Continue reading →

Sam Elliott has played convincing cowboys, hunky lifeguards, soldiers, artists and assorted men’s men on the big and small screen for the better part of 45 years. “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” Want somebody who can out testosterone Nick Offerman … Continue reading →

The movie of the summer thunders in on 22 armor-spiked wheels, because an 18-wheeler just wouldn’t do on “Fury Road.” Grim, gruesome and glorious, Mad Max: Fury Road” should send every post-apocalyptic sci-fi hack back to the word processor and … Continue reading →

Cheap, short and slow, “Hot Pursuit” is a comedy that never lets your forget that pairing up Sofia Vergara with Reese Witherspoon should have worked better than this. A mismatch-misfire badly misdirected by the director of “The Guilt Trip” and … Continue reading →

In “The D Train,” Jack Black plays a guy who never forgot his first high school “man crush.” Dan Landsman was the awkward lump nobody remembers. And the object of his crush? The swaggering jock, the popular and talented hunk, … Continue reading →

The considerable cinematic charms of Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman are no match for the hell that is the New York real estate market in “5 Flights Up,” a middling comedy about getting old, trying to downsize and running up … Continue reading →