“X-Men: Days of Future Past” is, pardon the pun, a marvel of comic book franchise filmmaking. It’s not only a strong (possibly the best) entry into the “X-Men” line, but one that carries all of the emotional and thematic weight of the series with it, turning the previous installments into the cars of a freight […]
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“The Call” is three parts “Cellular” and one part “Buried.” It’s a phone-driven thriller that sees a 911 operator on the line with a kidnapped girl as the girl’s captor transports her to the site of what will be a gruesome death. The high-concept premise doesn’t yield much new outside of its unusual setting, but
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Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. My accuracy doesn’t get much better than it was last weekend: I nailed “Oz the Great and Powerful” down to the decimal and I came within $400,000 of “Dead Man Down.” I’d quit the predictions
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This year’s Oscar-nominated short films will be released in select cities next month, but a vastly inferior program of shorts will sell at least 10 times the number of tickets. “Movie 43,” as it’s titled for no apparent reason, follows the Hollywood moneymaking formula recently re-popularized by “Valentine’s Day” and “New Year’s Eve”: maximize star-power
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“Cloud Atlas” is a huge, exhausting film, one that might defy audiences to even make up their minds about whether or not they like it. It’s an important work in that it demands analysis and discussion as precious few do, providing a cornucopia of ambitious technical decisions, intertwined narratives, and New Age rhetoric that succeeds
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