Author Archive
Movie
For the first 90 minutes, Rust and Bone is stereotypical art house fare. The French-Belgian film centers on Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer who has both legs cut off in a terrible accident. We see her hit rock bot...
Album Reviews
From the hypnotizing double entendre “Ohm” throughout the rest of the album, Fade is the work of a self-assured, comfortable – but never complacent – group of musicians. Yo La Tengo keeps challenging itself (working...
Movie
Not be confused with the Wayans brothers’ superior Scary Movie franchise, A Haunted House aims its satire at Paranormal Activity. And, like Paranormal Activity, it pretends as if it’s a homemade movie documenting the strange go...
Movie
It’s not hard to miss the controversy at the core of Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow’s (The Hurt Locker) drama about the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden. The movie opens with a scene in which CIA agent Dan (Jason Clarke)...
Movie
Based on Paul Lieberman’s Tales from the Gangster Squad, Gangster Squad has a good premise. It centers on Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), an ex-boxer who’s trying to be the main mob boss in L.A. in 1949. So ruthless that he chains a ...
Movie
The Impossible, a new film from Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage), benefits from the fact that it has built-in drama. Based on the true story of a family that somehow survived the horrible tsunami that ripped...
Movie
A drama about fracking? Are you fracking serious? Hard to imagine that discriminating director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk) thought Matt Damon and John Krasinski’s Promised Land screenplay — which is based on a Dave E...
Flicks
We fully admit we have yet to see these three critics’ darlings: Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Zero Dark Thirty. But we spent countless hours in darkened theaters sitting through a slew of other movies. Some truly disa...
Movie
Overly long and excessively violent, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained isn’t as great of a movie as some critics make it out to be. And yet, Christoph Waltz’s performance is so terrific, it practically redeems a film. A vete...
Movie
We haven’t read the 2005 novel One Shot that’s the source material for Jack Reacher, the new thriller that stars Tom Cruise as Reacher, a renegade private investigator of sorts. But even if we had, we still can’t imagine we’d h...