I’ll come clean: I missed “How to Train Your Dragon” when it first landed in theaters during 2010. These animated flicks seem to be a dime a dozen these days, and I probably wasn’t all that interested given the target audience and…
Andrew Neyman has a problem. Played by Miles Teller in the Oscar-winning film “Whiplash,” he’s an ambitious musician, a drummer in one of the elite music schools in the country. When the school’s top jazz instructor, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons),…
Say what you will about modern comedies. And judging from what Hollywood has kicked out in the last, say, five years, you might be able to muster up a whole lot. But once in a while something comes along that…
Perhaps there is no greater testament to the enduring strength of Shakespeare’s plays than the rich, incredibly varied interpretations the plays have encouraged, provoked or (in some cases) endured . Feudal Japan, 21st century American high school, gangland New York,…
When I first heard about “Big Hero 6,” its homonym main character Hiro, and his brother Tadashi, I wondered how Disney would be able to deliver a robotics story involving Japanese-named characters without being locked into an anime style. Well, if you’re…
Historically, action films tend to fall into two different categories. The first one is a $200 million explode-a-ganza with whomever the current crop of action studs are (think Michael Bay). The second one is usually direct to video with B…
Jean-Luc Godard’s “Every Man For Himself” (1980) opens with an elegant pan across a cloudy blue sky accompanied by a melodic orchestral arrangement, sound and image in perfect harmony. Anyone familiar with Godard’s previous decade of work had to suspect…
Jean Renoir’s “A Day In The Country” (“Partie de campagne”, 1936) has its legion of devotees, finishing in the top 100 in the most recent “Sight & Sound” critics poll. While it is undeniably beautiful and sometimes downright breathtaking, I…
Tough guys and kids. What is it that makes them so fascinating? In “Leon: The Professional” an assassin reluctantly “adopted” a girl whose family was murdered and taught her the trade. In the 2010 South Korean film “The Man from…
An old man prays for death so that he will no longer be a burden to his granddaughter. A swordsman dressed in black appears behind him and grants his request with a single brutal stroke. An avenging angel? Hardly. Ryunosuke…