Big Screen
It’s not that Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves, not entirely, anyway. (That would be, like, crazy. The kind of Brave New World you’d see laid out in a blistering manifesto.) Dudes still have a …
Why was there no review of Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie in this week’s print edition? Studio’s orders. Admittance to last week’s screening hinged on one minor condition. According to the email: “The global …
Walt Disney’s Bambi turns 75 this year. To mark the June 6 release of its Signature Collection Blu-ray combo pack, the studio made available for interviews the original voices of young Bambi and Thumper, Donnie …
This year, the Media Arts Center San Diego has taken over production of the iVIE Awards & Student Film Festival, a program started in 2001 “to encourage and reward teachers who utilize video as a …
Gnarly: difficult, dangerous, or challenging. The challenge of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales? To make poor old Johnny Depp appealing again. Annnnd...nope. The difficulty of Baywatch: to make a successful R-rated …
If Part Two is a sequel and Part Three a threequel, what term describes a film franchise’s fourth installment? Four-Shit would be a fitting brand, seeing as most of them are, but my editor will …
Not unlike an actual Grateful Dead concert, Amir Bar-Lev’s candid Dead doc Long Strange Trip plays one night only — Thursday, May 25 — and runs just slightly over four hours. My initial interest in …
I’m probably more fascinated by H.R. Giger and his xenomorph than is entirely healthy, so it took me a little while to get over the fact that the aliens aren’t really the star, or even …
Obit, Vanessa Gould’s documentary look at the obituary department of the New York Times in action, is as deceptive in tone as it is perceptive in vision. A strange air of calm rumination pervades the …
In case my review of the (don’t call it quirky, don’t call it quirky) quirky psycho-thriller Buster’s Mal Heart didn’t fully convey it, I want to further express my delight at the film’s portrayal of …
There’s been an ugly trend of late where Oscar-winning actresses who have been out of the limelight for some time return to play flamboyantly kooky mother figures. Jane Fonda did it twice (Monster-In-Law, Georgia Rule) …
Doug Liman’s The Wall pits two American soldiers (John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the latter looking like Jake Gyllenhaal and talking like Casey Affleck and acquitting himself admirably) against an Iraqi sniper in the pipelined, …
“You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you …
“Stub me,” I asked while stopping to split my ticket with the usher on duty at Reading Cinemas Grossmont Center. My left hand was preoccupied with notebook and silo of Coke, so I extended my …
Terence Davies’s slow and sumptuous A Quiet Passion turns the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (played mostly and hauntedly by Cynthia Nixon) into an unenthusiastic but unshakable martyr for her sex. It’s not that she …
Uh-oh. You’ve got America’s Most Beloved Actor (TM) Tom Hanks plus Emma Watson, the star of 2017’s biggest hit (Beauty and the Beast), in a techno-thriller designed to push everyone’s buttons about the companies whose …