Archive | September 2013
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Flashback: on 2001’s Murder on a Sunday Morning
Just a few words for this month’s Flashback feature, because I don’t find it necessary to get too descriptive for it. “Murder on a Sunday Morning” won the 2001 Best Documentary Feature Oscar, and it is an exhaustive and compelling watch. French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade focuses has camera on the tale of 15 year-old […]
The Bling Ring
Sofia Coppola is back in form for “The Bling Ring”. Even though it’s decidedly slight, I very much enjoyed its style. Why do I say, “back in form” though? Well, I very much liked Sofia’s first two features as a director, although I’ve often said that I believe “The Virgin Suicides” is underrated and “Lost […]
Remembering Ken Norton…film star and conquerer of Ali
He was certainly handsome enough to be an actor, and he had a physique that looked like it was chiseled from marble. He boxed the great Muhammad Ali three times and even beat him the first time around, breaking Ali’s jaw in the process. Their trilogy was so closely scored and hotly contested that there […]
World War Z
My expectations were quite tepid for Marc Forster’s adaptation of the novel World War Z, so I set the bar very low. Multiple reasons for this. One was that I haven’t liked anything I’ve seen from Marc Forster since 2001’s “Monster’s Ball”. That list consists of “Finding Neverland”, “The Kite Runner” and one of my […]
Douglas! Soderbergh! Candleabra!
You know, I don’t really do television, but I’m occasionally interested in a highly-touted T.V. movie. And I was singing the praises, back in May, of Steven Soderbergh’s “Behind the Candleabra” and its star(as Liberace)Michael Douglas. I even went as far in my review as outright forecasting that Douglas would easily garner an Emmy Award […]
Theatre on the way!!!
This film and theatre blog has, of late, become a film only blog. It has caused me much distress as I went through the panging withdrawals of going stage-free for a number of months. Vacations, scheduling, business trips have all contributed to the recent barren front. But fear not! I have just booked two shows […]
Riddick IMAX
With each of the first two Riddick films, my heart grew fonder with the passage of time. So, I intend to get ahead of myself for this third installment and declare it pretty solid, despite some reservations. Of course, the unrated director’s cuts helped in each instance for the first chapters—especially concerning 2004’s overstuffed “The […]
Star Trek Into Darkness
It probably wouldn’t be accurate to label me a Star Trek purist, or a Trekkie(Trekker to many)for that matter, but I guess I’m a pretty big fan of the original Roddenberry universe. I was born in 1965, and the original series premiered the following year and ran for 3 seasons. Those reruns were on television […]
The Lords of Salem
Until he blows it in the 3rd act, I really believed that Rob Zombie had something going here. It wasn’t until then, that “The Lords of Salem” became little more than a silly “Rosemary’s Baby” knock-off. And it’s especially disheartening, because he had built a sizable amount of tension and good will up until that […]
Reviewed by Mark Leonard 