Taylor Sheridan, the screenwriter for Hell or High Water, understands the intricacies of the conversations of men, men who talk a lot but never say what they mean; men whose jovial choice of words hides a deeper melancholy and pain. As screenwriter for “Sons of Anarchy” and Sicario, Sheridan writes towards the meanings between the words.
Pete’s Dragon isn’t exactly a remake of the original 1977 Disney film. That film was a musical, with a hand-drawn animated dragon and a different story altogether, although the characters of Pete (Oakes Fegley) and his dragon Elliot remain. Instead of a whimsical Disney musical, David Lowery and co-screenwriter Toby Halbrooks have decided to take a
BY SCOTT CHITWOOD Kubo and the Two Strings has impressive stop-motion animation, a fun voice cast, and a story that will draw in people that like Hayao Miyazaki films, but a slow pace and dreamy tone may lull audiences to sleep while dragging it down overall. Story: Long ago in ancient Japan, Kubo and his
By Joshua Starnes ON August 17, 2016 It’s hard to say exactly which is the most frustrating aspect of Ben-Hur; the catalog of terrible decisions on display or the good choices all those bad ideas cover up. Quiet when it should be loud, loud when it should be quiet, the newest version of Lew Wallace’s
9:00 AM PDT 8/2/2016 by Todd McCarthy Director David Ayer (‘Fury’) brings his eagerly awaited DC Comics-based action noir to the screen, with Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto and Viola Davis starring. A puzzlingly confused undertaking that never becomes as cool as it thinks it is, Suicide Squad assembles an all-star team of supervillains
By Joshua Starnes ON July 28, 2016 William Goldman famously said of Hollywood “no one knows nothing;” the creators of successful films are frequently just as clueless as to why their films succeeded as the creators of failures. The only strategy for dealing with this problem is, when success is stumbled over, to repeat, repeat,
11:40 PM PDT 3/14/2016 by John DeFore Seth Rogen leads an A-list cast of voice actors playing groceries who don’t know what happens once they’re taken home from the supermarket. Sausage Party, an R-rated comedy about food products waiting to be sold at a supermarket, begins unpromisingly, with a musical number so effing gratuitously overstuffed
The afterlife is a pretty mysterious thing, even for those of us who have a good idea of where we’re going. What will our ultimate destination look like? Feel like? Will it have lots of harps? Could it spiral through nine circles? We read our Bibles and listen to the experts and maybe even watch
Caleb Smith has just won the lottery. It’s not the kind of lottery most people ever have a chance to play. The 26-year-old coder at the world’s largest search engine, Bluebook, has won a company-wide contest to spend a week with their famously reclusive president, Nathan Bateman. How reclusive? Well, to get to the guy,
As this seventh story starts, Dominic Toretto and his makeshift family of hotshot hot rodders and heavy-fisted rumblers are all focused on personal pursuits. Former undercover cop Brian, for instance, is gearing up to be a carpool dad and attentive hubby. And Dom’s love interest, Letty, is still trying to regain her memories—lost in a