A stampede of pigs careens its way down the streets of Yokosuka, smashing, crashing, bashing their way through crowds of prostitutes, pimps, and military police. Behind them a small-time gangster blasts a machine gun into the neon hell of the…
Movie Review: ‘Taken 3’
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, and now you’re just sequel-baiting. Yes, the Taken franchise returns once again with Olivier Megaton’s Taken 3. At this point you should know the drill:…
The Film Canon: Sabotage (1936)
In 1936 Alfred Hitchcock’s name was not yet immortalized as the Master of Suspense, but he was getting there. Having labored through the twenties and early thirties making flat, flavorless silent melodramas and romantic “comedies,” Hitchcock had reinvented himself as…
Movie Review: Big Eyes
There’s something unsettling about Walter Keane. His limbs are long and gangly, his face bent in a perpetual, twisted smile like a cheshire cat with gigantism; Richard Kiel by way of Lewis Carroll. He has a way of moving his…
Movie Review: Into the Woods
Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods is one of those great rarities of the stage: an introspective musical. There aren’t any big song-and-dance numbers with complex choreography and tons of extras. Catchy melodies are practically de-emphasized in favor of intricate wordplay…
‘The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies’ Review
Well, the third Hobbit movie has finally arrived and with it the end of Peter Jackson’s controversial trilogy. All complaints about his over-reliance on computer effects and the merciless stretching of Tolkien’s book into three movies can now only be…
‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ Review
To make a great film about faith or the faith stories of any religion, the filmmakers have to approach the material with some form of conviction. It doesn’t have to be a religious conviction, per say; but it must be…
