7 years ago
Susan Sarandon 9
Hell Hath No Fury
Emma Stefansky writes about the connections between Tony Scott's "The Hunger" and the new film "The Love Witch."
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TIFF Review: “About Ray”
Even though About Ray revolves around a transgender teenager, this isn’t the hot-button topical-issue film one might expect. Certainly, there is very little anguished hand-wringing about transgender issues; among most of the main cast of characters, transgende...
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Blu-ray Review: “The Hunger”
Tony Scott foregrounds the aesthetic context for his vampire-movie debut The Hunger before the first images roll. Over introductory credits comes the sound of goth outfit Bauhaus striking up their biggest hit, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” as the frame fades up on fron...
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The Twisted, Outrageous, and Empathetic Mind of George Miller
I. In a profile published by the L.A. Weekly around the release of the 2006 animated musical Happy Feet, Australian director George Miller—creator of the Mad Max franchise, co-founder of Kennedy Miller Mitchell productions, and former medical student—said that...
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Stuck in the Middle with You: Defending “Tammy”
When considering the inherent biases of film critics, we usually think about race and gender first. Despite some progress made in the last few years, the vast majority of critics are still white and male. At least this is a fixable problem, although it will su...
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“Tammy” A Maddeningly Muddled and Inconsistent Star Vehicle for Melissa McCarthy
If there is one vexing problem at the core of American comedy in the 21st century worth talking about now--there's more than just one, of course--it's that too many actors, writers, and filmmakers are convinced that audiences will only accept sincere emotion i...
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Justin Zackham On The Universal Truth That Helped Him Write Romantic Comedy The Big Wedding
Hollywood rumor has it that Zackham wrote The Bucket List in two weeks, so when I got to interview the screenwriter -- and first-time director -- of course I had to ask how long The Big Wedding took. He laughed and said that reports of his speedy writing had b...
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Dueling Takes on The Big Wedding: Color-By-Numbers Rom-Com With Surprisingly Dark Shading
B/D+
With the romantic comedy getting increasingly tedious, recent entries seem to respond by either going back to basics or pushing the limits of the formulaic story into an almost meta commentary. The former describes Save the Date, one of my favorite mov...
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The Big Wedding Is a Big Failure
Some scripts can be saved by a good cast that delivers the material with as much chutzpah as possible. And then there are some that are simply unsalvageably dreadful. The Big Wedding is one of those scripts. Primarily based on a French comedy called Mon frère ...
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