The Counselor
Most bad movies are failures of inspiration and ambition, barely worth discussing. It takes talent to make a film so creatively, indelibly awful that anyone who sees it is likely to reference it for...
View ArticleA New Documentary Celebrates Vermont's Small — and Bygone — Ski Areas
Growing up in Vermont, brothers Elliot and Tyler Wilkinson-Ray spent countless happy hours skiing. The slopes their family favored were not at the state’s major resorts, however, but at the...
View ArticleLast Vegas
You read a lot about the battle between digital and celluloid, but little about the format that’s rapidly becoming dominant in Hollywood: Geezerscope. Mark my words, the day is approaching when every...
View ArticleEnder's Game
If old-people movies sell fantasies of tossing away your responsibilities in your eighties, kid-friendly movies (which form the vast bulk of Hollywood’s current output) sell fantasies of having the...
View Article12 Years a Slave
Where are the serious American films about slavery? And how did I fail to note the paucity of pictures addressing our national dirty laundry? Just one of the great things about this great new movie is...
View ArticleAbout Time
My favorite moment in About Time is when Bill Nighy, playing a retired professor who can reverse time and relive portions of his own life, admits how he’s used this miraculous talent: to read thousands...
View ArticleAll Is Lost
When it comes to man-versus-nature adventures, I’m pretty sure it’s a bad sign if every now and then you find yourself rooting for nature. It’s a sign something’s gone seriously wrong when the man is...
View ArticleBlue Is the Warmest Color
Forget for a second about the graphic sex scenes and the attendant controversies. I was struck by something different in this Palme d’Or winner from cowriter-director Abdellatif Kechiche — namely, how...
View ArticleShort Takes on Film: The Hunt; A Defiant Dude Update
It’s autumn, and the men of a small Danish burg are gearing up for their beloved deer season. Soon one of them will find himself not hunting, but hunted — by his own friends and neighbors. That’s the...
View ArticleDallas Buyers Club
Movie-star trajectories don’t usually work like Matthew McConaughey’s. Important actors traditionally make the films for which they’re remembered early on, and then run out the career clock doing work...
View ArticleThe Hunger Games: Catching Fire
With The Hunger Games franchise, Hollywood has finally found a good reason for smoking up the screen with teen angst. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) doesn’t sulk her way through this sequel...
View ArticleDocumented on Film, Vermont Fiddle Orchestra Players Shine
Jericho native Sarah Hotchkiss trained as a violist from the age of 11, played in the Vermont Youth Orchestra and attended the Crane School of Music in Potsdam, N.Y., for her first two years of...
View ArticlePhilomena
And just like that, Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand are robbed of the title of Most Cloying and Thoroughly Preposterous Duo on a Road Trip in Movie History (for last year’s The Guilt Trip). Who...
View ArticleFrozen
It’s official: Disney is courting the smart-moms demographic with its latest princess movies. In Tangled (2010), Rapunzel didn’t wait around for a prince to climb up her hair. And in Frozen, romance...
View ArticleOut of the Furnace
Crazy Heart, the Oscar-winning directorial debut of actor-turned-filmmaker Scott Cooper, told a story of small-town people with dwindling prospects who, against all odds, achieve a level of grace. It...
View ArticleThe Book Thief
The Book Thief has touched off a mini-debate about whether the world needs more Holocaust films. Yet nobody has asked the truly pressing question: Does the world need more movies that exhort young...
View ArticleAnti-Christmas Movie: White Reindeer
Some people seek out Christmas movies around the holidays. And others seek out anti-Christmas movies. Those in the latter category may want to drop in on White Reindeer, the latest drama from Brooklyn...
View ArticleAmerican Hustle
How apropos that the con artist in David O. Russell’s new film has a sideline selling forgeries. American Hustle plays like an imitation of Scorsese. As with many knock-offs, the resemblance to the...
View ArticleSaving Mr. Banks
Let this just be said: Mary Poppins forever. P.L. Travers’ magical nanny is one of the strangest and most memorable figures in children’s lit, an unsentimental drill sergeant of a woman who introduces...
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Kisonak and Harrison at the Movies 2013
RICK KISONAK: What better place than our year-end wrap-up to note that in 2013 the end itself proved a major trend? I don’t know what was in the pop-culture water (global warming, the NSA, the Jonas...
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