If Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott had cursed more and been in charge of the new presidential directives to put boots in space, The Office would be Space Force. Here, Carrell is General Mark R. Naird, the Chief of Space Operations. He’s a hardworking soldier who has always played fair, hoping to one day direct the…
Netflix’s latest straight-to-streaming films are certainly rivaling what’s available in theaters. Too soon? In the romantic comedy The Lovebirds, Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani play a pair of lovers falling out of love who end up stuck in a murder mystery involving a secret cult and some bumbling drug dealers. Some of it doesn’t make…
Ron Shelton once teamed with Kevin Costner to deliver one of the top-10 sports films of all time (and the second-best baseball film to star Costner) with Bull Durham. As a one-time minor league baseball player, Shelton was hardwired to tell that story, but he wasn’t done. He also wrote (and directed or produced) White…
In between GoldenEye and Casino Royale, director Martin Campbell dropped two other throwback films of another franchise, that of the swashbuckling vigilante from Spanish California, Don Diego de la Vega AKA Zorro. Zorro debuted in a 1919 novel by Johnston McCulley, but a 1920 Douglas Fairbanks film sent McCulley into a forty-year stint writing more…
Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne star in Paramount’s latest comedy, as Mia Carter and Mel Paige, co-owners of Mel & Mia’s, a cosmetics company who sell out to beauty mogul Claire Luna (Salma Hayek), and then discover they aren’t willing out to give up the control she demands. As Luna works to drive a spike…
I don’t know why I love The Town so much. Maybe it’s because it’s so Boston, the biggest city near where I grew up in Rhode Island. Maybe it’s because it’s an exciting, tense film based on Chris Hogan’s book. Maybe it’s because it’s full of strong performances by actors like Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner…
The artist formerly known as Marky Mark is one of my favorites. His films usually revolve around a normal guy (or as normal as you can be when you can benchpress a small rhino) who finds himself up against “it,” whatever it is, and struggles to battle against the unrelenting tide through to “victory.” Brash,…
Richard Donner’s epic film Superman the Movie is … “swell,” to quote Clark Kent. While superhero films have advanced in production (well, except for maybe Green Lantern), Donner’s original hero films (counting the first and second films about Kent AKA Kal-El AKA Superman) remain high up on my list. While the flash-bangs of Marvel’s Avengers…
?Misery, you can?t get away from it.? — Officer Jerry In a shocking follow-up to his directorial debut Generational Sins, director and screenwriter Spencer Folmar delivers a powerful warning about the state of the world, explicitly about the opioid epidemic and even more deftly about the way we relate to each other in terms of…
If I’m being honest, this could be any number of superhero films – Superman the Movie, Avengers (the first one), etc. – but I decided that Batman Begins still reflects the socio-political environment of our world today. And seriously, can you go wrong with Christopher Nolan? Fifteen years ago, the keys to the Batmobile were…
