The true history of nuclear energy and its potential to solve climate change, according to director Oliver Stone. The looming climate crisis remains unresolved, and the volume of carbon-free electricity needed over the next 30 years is almost unimaginable. This film aims to remove the fears associated with nuclear energy …
It is only natural to find something a little behind-times about a front-line Vietnam movie of 1986, just as one would have done about a tub-thumping World War II movie like Darby's Rangers in 1959. And for all of writer-director Oliver Stone's credentials as a Vietnam veteran himself, the sense …
John Mackenzie's account of events leading up to the Jack Kennedy assassination from the obstructed point of view of Jack Ruby has many narrative virtues not shared by Oliver Stone's JFK: focus, cohesion, cogency, compactness, an enveloping ambience, not to mention the absence of an external publicity machine to drum …
Sleazoid journalist becomes engagé in El Salvador, ca. 1980-81. He also becomes the vehicle for the filmmakers' political convictions, or in other words The Straight Truth -- or in the words of the caricatured American military advisor: "wild, left-wing commie crap." This comes ill from a man who had gone …
Oliver Stone’s latest “just say yes” endeavor is reminiscent of his work on Scarface. The only shock here is that 30 years later, the brutal killing and graphic dismemberment is being performed in the name of blowing weed, not snorting coke. Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch star as a pair …
Oliver Stone serves up a sort of companion piece to Laura Poitras’s excellent documentary Citizenfour, which records whistleblower Edward Snowden’s hidden vigil in a Hong Kong hotel as his exposure of secret and illegal U.S. government surveillance becomes headline news. But it isn’t much of a companion: where the documentary …
Oliver Stone's adaptation of a stage play by (and with) Eric Bogosian. And, for all the spaciousness of the set, the restless camerawork, the misty, powdery flashbacks, it very much looks like it. Like a stage play, that is. The basic text of it, taking off from the real-life murder …
Oliver Stone makes a stomach-lurching return to his worst Natural Born Killers style. Provided, that is, "style" can describe an indiscriminate hodgepodge of manic mannerisms from music videos, half-minute commercial spots (soft drinks, jeans), and "reality"-based TV shows (NYPD Blue, ER, et al.). Nowhere in his repertoire of cinematic hiccups, …
Where does skit-assembler Adam McKay (SNL, Anchorman) get off receiving name-above-the-title status? The Big Short wasn’t enough to warrant such an elevation, never mind the Oscar noms (and McKay’s win for adapted screenplay), and this throw-everything-against-the-screen-and-see-what-sticks attempt to mimic Oliver Stone is a giant, self-conscious plunge in the wrong direction. …
Pronounced “dubya.” Oliver Stone’s diplomatic biopic on our forty-third President (Josh Brolin, a dead-on impression, but where to go with it?) is so careful to avoid bias as to avoid purpose. It barely matches the caliber of a TV docudrama, much less the compensating snickers. In that department, Thandie Newton …
A somewhat livelier movie about the stock market than "Rollover" -- praise so faint that it would do better just to lie down with a cool washcloth pressed to its forehead. And Michael Douglas, while no less of a Leftish actor happy to cut his own character's throat, is a …
This French coming-of-homosexual-age tale ("I'm a faggot," repeated eight or nine times to the face in the bathroom mirror), against a distant backdrop of the Algerian War, is thoroughly serious, intelligent, tasteful, sensitive -- and unmemorable. Possibly a few recollectable moments of the honor guard in open-air repose (sprawling on …
Looking on the bright side of 9/11: the fact-based story of two Port Authority policemen (Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, roughly four hundred closeups between them) who, together with a couple of unluckier comrades, dauntlessly entered Tower One with the intention to help evacuate it, and survived the collapse of it …