Television veteran Chadwick Boseman gives a fine, canny performance as Jackie Robinson, the man who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Well, except for when he talks to his wife and infant son: then, writer-director Brian Helgeland’s script drives him into speechmaking about the …
The original novel by Michael Connelly seemed to have been written with a movie in mind: one of those overblown, overheated thrillers whose villain is a taunting, string-pulling, game-playing archfiend of boogeyman dimensions. Clint Eastwood (cited, for unspecified services, in the book's acknowledgments) has made a better movie of it …
Topical war film feeds off and into the widespread cynicism, which is to say the widespread enlightenment, as to the motives behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Matt Damon, maturing into an actor of spartan economy and vigilant interiority, plays the army officer charged with running down the …
The Dark Ages lightened up: a rock-and-roll songtrack (Queen, Bowie, BTO, others), a spontaneous eruption of disco dancing at court, a Nike insignia on a suit of armor, a Mademoiselle cover girl for a fair maiden, and a centuries-ahead-of-his-time democratic hero, a lowborn squire who skyrockets to superstardom in the …
How do you make a boring film about gangster twins in ‘60s London, one of whom is a violent, paranoid schizophrenic homosexual, and both of whom are played by Tom Hardy? Easy: neglect the violent, paranoid schizophrenic homosexual and play up the other one’s girlfriend. While you’re at it, give …
A supernatural stinker (call it The Odor, if you prefer) about the earthshaking showdown between the last of the Carolingian priests and the last of the Sin Eaters. The latter -- an immortal who in effect vacuums out the grime from human souls, granting deathbed redemption to the unrepentant -- …
Brian Helgeland, who came to prominence as co-screenwriter of L.A. Confidential, has chosen for his directorial debut to do a rehash of John Boorman's Point Blank, though it is not so much warmed over as served straight from the freezer, with a thin decolorizing layer of frost on it. The …