From 2001 to 2004, Simon Baker (The Mentalist) starred in The Guardian, as a corporate lawyer convicted of drug abuse who finds himself assigned to the Legal Services office of Pittsburgh. He’s cutthroat and thorough as a businessman, but when he finds himself face-to-face with minors who can’t speak for themselves, he discovers a new…
In Hedgehogs, a brash young hedgehog named Bobby (Anthony Padilla) loses his memory of who he is and what he is, makes friends with a bird named Hubert (Jon Heder), and battles a human (Chevy Chase) intent on eradicating animals. Originally in Chinese, the film is directed by?Jianming Huang, and arrives now on DVD via…
R.J. Palacio’s novel,?Wonder, captivated young people and their parents, but Stephen Chbosky’s cinematic adaptation was a sensation that caused theaters to add showings as screenings sold out. Centered around the story of Auggie (Jacob Tremblay), a young man with?mandibulofacial dysostosis, it shone a spotlight on the way that we treat people who don’t look, sound,…
Daddy’s Home took two disparate actors and dropped them in the middle of a battle over the hearts of two young children. It had poignant moments and various comedic hijinks. It worked on some levels because of the goofiness of the first actor, Will Ferrell, and the straightforward bluntness of the other, Mark Wahlberg. In…
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight?takes Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola’s story of the same name, unofficially the first DC Elseworlds story printed, and transforms it into an R-rated animated feature film that pits Batman against Jack the Ripper. With Bruce Greenwood as Batman/Bruce Wayne and Jennifer Carpenter as Selina Kyle, the film dynamically spins a story…
In an opening scene that is shocking for both its lack of humanity and its restraint, Rosalie Quaid (Rosalind Pike) witnesses the murder of her husband and children at the hands of a Comanche raiding party in 1892. A few days later, Quaid is discovered by Captain Joe Blocker (Christian Bale), who is unwillingly escorting…
In George Clooney’s?Suburbicon, things are broken. The focus of the media attention in this 1959 paradise of picket fences and?Stepford Wives?values is the arrival of the first African-American family, the Mayers, who quietly move in across from Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) and his family. But the audience’s attention is drawn to a terse, charged home…
In Geostorm,?Clive Butler stars as Jake Lawson, the architect behind a revolutionary process that controls the weather via satellite called “Dutch Boy.” Thanks to an opening voiceover by Lawson’s daughter, we know that weather is out of control but that Lawson’s Dutch Boy has saved millions of lives. But with any technology, there’s plenty of…
All they wanted was a boys’ night out at a boxing match… Director Stephen Hopkins made his bones with tension-filled action flicks like?Predator 2,?Blown Away, and?The Ghost in the Darkness, while also marking the opening salvo of?24?with his direction. But in 1993’s?Judgment Night, he directs a quartet of young actors as suburban young adults trapped…
Warner Bros. has released a 1959 Technicolor Western,?The Hanging Tree, starring Gary Cooper in high definition, nearly sixty years after the film’s release and Cooper’s death. Snatching it up to cover for #TBT, I grabbed some sandwiches and headed to a retirees’ house for a lunch date. I was astonished to find that this couple…
