‘Born to Be Blue is a perfectly decent bio-pic of the late, great jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. The film serves up some clever reinventions of overly familiar bio-pic forms in the hopes of reinventing the genre. For a while, it...
Dark comedy is a difficult beast to tame. It’s a fine line between shock laughs and pandering tedium. It’s all too easy to numb your audience with outrageousness if you’re unable to top yourself or at least stumb...
The recent relaunch of the Muppet film franchise may have fizzled after just two movies, but a little setback like that can’t keep a good frog, pig or bear down. Jim Henson’s iconic felt creations return to television ...
NBC clearly wants (and expects) its new action/thriller series ‘Blindspot’ to target the same audience that made ‘The Blacklist’ such a hit. The two shows will probably make a good pairing, though this one ...
Remote-controlled pigeons, really? That’s the best plot that the writers could come up with for the big, expensive premiere of their ‘Minority Report’ TV spin-off? How disappointing.
It’s pretty typical for an action/comedy to include a romantic sub-plot. It’s also quite common for that to be the worst part of the movie. However, ‘Mr. Right’ is a welcome exception to the rule. This big,...
Six years ago, Australian director Sean Byrne established himself as a film nerd genre director to watch with ‘The Loved Ones’, which played like a John Hughes movie with graphic dismemberment flourishes. The flick bec...
Two years ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s son Jonás helped him script the stunning blockbuster ‘Gravity’. Around the same time, Jonás Cuarón was also writing his own movie, ‘Desierto’, which was a similarly str...
Is it too early to declare ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ a bad television series? It’s certainly not too early to call it a disappointing one, and that disappointment continues in Episode 4, an entry so inconsequential...
A few of the fall TV season’s new shows have already premiered, but this week brings the first truly big push. Which new dramas and comedies have caught your attention?
Ilya Naishuller’s ‘Hardcore’ is a tricky movie. One the one hand, it’s a pretty amazing technical accomplishment that’s almost without precedent and will pin genre fans to their seats. On the other ha...
After a few years away getting up to god knows what (presumably debauchery of some sort), bad boy filmmaker Gaspar Noé has returned. For over a decade, the director has hyped up a dream of making an X-rated entertainment for the a...
