VULTURE: Director J.J. Abrams is so intuitively unoriginal that he’s almost mystical: He seems to be using the Force to get on the wavelength of other filmmakers. He aped Steven Spielberg’s signature moves in the sci-fi adventure Super 8. He rekindled Star Trek onscreen, delighting many fans — even if they couldn’t point to a single performance or scene that surpassed the old films or shows. Now, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he does a good imitation of George Lucas circa 1977. He and co-writers Michael Arndt and Lawrence Kasdan (who co-wrote by far the best of the […]

  LOS ANGELES TIMES: The really, really ridiculously good-looking days of Derek Zoolander are over — at least that’s what the “Zoolander 2” trailer would have us believe. The washed-up male supermodel played by Ben Stiller and his rival-turned-pal Hansel, played by Owen Wilson, returned to the runway on Paramount’s new trailer for the follow-up to the 2001 screwball comedy. Stiller and Wilson confirmed the start of “Zoolander 2” when they hijacked the Valentino runway in character at Paris Fashion Week in March and have dropped a few teasers since, and with the plot being revealed in the trailer the […]

  THE DANISH GIRL (2015, directed by Tom Hooper, 119 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Just to make sure people didn’t think it was a film about a girl who loved pastries, the studio has been leaking pictures of Eddie Redmayne in all his cross-dressing elegance as the title character in The Danish Girl, another lush period piece from Tom Hooper, director of 2010’s Oscar-winning The King’s Speech, for months prior to the film’s release. In this post-Caitlin Jenner moment, The Danish Girl hopes to ride its subject into the money this holiday season. Too bad its story […]

  THE DANISH GIRL (2015, directed by Tom Hooper, 119 minutes, U.K.) BY ELIZABETH MARIE WIEST Academy Award-winning director Tom Hooper’s (The King’s Speech, Les Miserables) thought-provoking new film The Danish Girl is the true story of Einar Wegener a failed Danish painter whose transition into Lili Erbe marks the first sexual reassignment surgical procedure ever attempted, and her story the first transgender biography ever recorded. The film depicts the evolving relationship of Einar (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander), and how his gender identity crisis actually brings the couple closer together. The year is 1920. Einar and […]

  BY SHARNITA MIDGETT Like Killadelphia, Chiraq is a nickname no city would ever want. It was first coined in 2010 by then-Chicago Police superintendent Jody Weis. “We are not Chiraq,” he said. “We are Chicago.” He was bemoaning the fact that on a good day Chicago’s body count matches — and often exceeds — Iraq on it’s worse day. Little has changed in five years. As of November 23rd, there were 2703 shootings — an average of eight a day — and 440 gun deaths in Chicago in 2015. Spike Lee tackles the issue head-on with his latest film, […]

Suffragette (2015, Directed by Sarah Gavron, 105 minutes, USA) BY ELIZABETH WIEST Director Sarah Gavron’s (Brick Lane, This Little Life) latest period piece Suffragette follows four proto-feminist foot soldiers through the smog and grime of nineteenth century London as they stir up a grass roots rebellion demanding women’s right to vote. The centerpiece of the film is a gracefully understated performance by Carey Mulligan as the daring Maud Watts, a factory worker, wife, and mother who becomes increasingly fed up with the indignities of life among Britain’s female proletariat. As her involvement with the burgeoning women’s movement intensifies, she becomes […]

  THE GUARDIAN: Kent Jones’s enjoyable documentary – presented in the festival’s Cannes Classics section – is a tribute to a pioneering act of cinephilia, cinema criticism and living ancestor worship. François Truffaut’s remarkable interview series with Alfred Hitchcock, conducted over a week at his offices at Universal Studios in 1962, was a journalistic enterprise which changed the way cinema was thought of as an art form. Nowadays, a young film-maker might envisage a similar exercise in terms of a film or cable TV series – but what Truffaut finally produced was text: a fascinatingly illustrated book, like the record […]

  WRONG REEL: So by now the majority of Marvel fanatics like myself around the world are embarrassing themselves weeping with joy over the first official trailer to Captain America: Civil War. I won’t even attempt to articulate the myriad ways I am reveling in the superhero carnage on display. I live for this shit and will be watching this on repeat for months. Seeing Cap, Bucky and Falcon teaming up, taking on the world, there are no words, just sheer joy at seeing my childhood heroes do what they do best. Newcomer Black Panther also looks totally badass. If […]

  THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2015, directed by Billy Ray, 111 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The Secret in Their Eyes, a new thriller opening today, comes to the screen with an impressive pedigree. A remake of the Academy Award-winning Argentinian film of the same name, it is helmed by director Billy Ray, coming off the Oscar-nominated Captain Phillips and co-starring two Oscar-winning actresses, Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts. It is the type of noir-ish mystery that is a formulaic house of cards one would hope Hollywood could mount with some sort of efficiency. With Roberts and […]

SPOTLIGHT (2015, directed by Tom McCarthy, 128 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Since 2003, writer/director Tom McCarthy has directed a steady handful of compact little character-driven indie features (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win/Win) that have been among the most resonant U.S. films of our era. With Spotlight, his sprawling look at the Boston Globe‘s investigation of the Catholic clergy’s sex crimes, McCarthy gives the impression of a talent in full bloom. In his largest scale film yet, Spotlight takes us down the wormhole of abuse, lies and church power without losing us in the labyrinth or forgetting […]

  SPECTRE (2015, directed by Sam Mendes, 148 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Skyfall, the previous entry in the long-running Bond series, was one of the British secret agent’s strongest chapters and bringing Bond face-to face with his origins it would have been a perfect capper to Daniel Craig’s 007 trilogy. It was never meant to be though, Craig’s Bond films have been the franchise’s biggest grossers yet and he has been contracted to serve as Bond for five films (although Craig seems desperate to break that contract). Spectre‘s script unfortunately unwinds the Craig trilogy’s tidy symmetry, making […]

  BY SHARNITA MIDGETT Evil Dead fans rejoice because more of the beloved horror-comedy franchise’s patented zany gorefests is coming to a small screen near you on October 31st when a new sitcom created (along with Bruce Campbell) directed by Sam Raimi called Ash Vs Evil Dead premiers on Starz. The show features Bruce Campbell reprising his role as Ash Williams, the goofy anti-hero/chief zombie-slayer of the Evil Dead series as a war vet suffering PTSD and survivor’s guilt who gets sucked back into the war against Evil. Thank god he still has his chainsaw arm, and a new sidekick […]