So why, why more American Pie?
It’s a lame one, just the same one, now with much older guys.
Ashton Kutcher to play Steve Jobs in biopic
‘Hunger Games’ on top again with $58.6 million
Swinton grounds ‘We need to talk about Kevin’
For Lynne Ramsay, motives are vague, sometimes unknowable things.
In the Scottish director’s films — three features, including the new We Need to Talk About Kevin — characters act out awkwardly and unpredictably, baffled and nullified by deadly predicaments that are, in some measure, their own making.
‘Salmon Fishing’ is no great catch
By Moira Macdonald Seattle Times “It was really not about the fishing at all,” notes a character near the end of Lasse Hallstrom’s slight though appealing comedy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. He’s not kidding; if ever a movie was hung on a metaphor, this is it. Salmon fishing in Yemen, it turns out, is…
‘Titans’ tickles the funny bone on its way to Hades
By Roger Moore McClatchy-Tribune News Service What’s the old saying — “3-D fool me once, shame on you, 3-D fool me twice, shame on me?” Clash of the Titans was a nearly humorless, overly digitized remake of a piece of sword-and-sorcery cheese from the 1980s, an inoffensive big-budget trifle whose biggest sin was a post-production…
Local jewelry creator finds Hollywood niche in ‘Hunger Games’
It’s rare when a piece of jewelry has as much significance in a movie as the Mockingjay pin in The Hunger Games. It’s beautiful, powerful — and created by a local jewelry designer.
Review: ‘Hunger Games’ faithful to the book
The Hunger Games is a reasonably faithful adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ bestselling novel, with a fine lead performance by Jennifer Lawrence.
Movie review: ‘In Darkness”
By Mick LaSalle San Francisco Chronicle To give the highest recommendation to a Holocaust movie is to anticipate a certain resistance in the reader. Such resistance is understandable. One might think that years and years of seeing Holocaust movies would create an immunity, a point at which you can feel no more. But, in fact,…
Kevin Smith offers life advice in new book
Jeff Ayers For The Associated Press Tough Sh-t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (Gotham Books), by Kevin Smith: Film director and comic-book geek extraordinaire Kevin Smith dispenses wisdom in his new book, a touching reflection on his life and career. Smith, director of Clerks, Mallrats and Jersey Girl, reflects on…
’21 Jump Street’ leaps to No. 1 with $35 million debut
Hunger Games, where kids kill kids
Into the dark, Twilight. Off to a magical land, Harry Potter. You have played well, but The Hunger Games now dominates the arena.
‘Being Flynn’: A father-son reunion on the way to the abyss
Early in Being Flynn, the new movie directed by Paul Weitz, Jonathan Flynn slides behind the wheel of a yellow cab as his voice, on the soundtrack, gives vent to a barrage of misanthropy. It is hard for a movie lover not to detect a wink in this otherwise perfectly ordinary scene, since Jonathan is played by Robert De Niro, the most famous taxi driver in movies. Being Flynn is a much milder movie than Taxi Driver, pursuing intimate themes rather than big ideas, but Jonathan Flynn and Travis Bickle are linked by the discrepancy between self-image and reality and also by De Niro’s gift for portraying alienated men at odds with themselves.
‘Jeff’ lives at home and inside his addled head
By Roger Moore McClatchy-Tribune News Service Jeff, Who Lives at Home could be just another quirky, abrasive and unconventional relationship comedy from the Duplass Brothers, the fellows who gave us The Puffy Chair and last year’s Cyrus. It starts with the assertion — by Jeff (Jason Segel), the title character — that “everyone and everything…
