Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Monday, July 27, 2015

Paper Towns







Nat Wolff – the third wheel in “The Fault in Our Stars” and the hair-trigger dangerous kid in “Palo Alto” - softens his edges considerably in the YA romantic mystery “Paper Towns” (also from a book by “Fault” scribe John Green), and here’s the movie that proves, yes, the camera truly is drawn to him.

Pixels






“Pixels” is not “Citizen Kane.” Neither is it “cinematic chlamydia.”

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Southpaw





Another fully committed performance by the gifted Jake Gyllenhaal sets the boxing family drama “Southpaw” above most pretenders to the throne.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Lila & Eve, An Open Secret

Lila & Eve
An Open Secret





"Lila & Eve" crashed and burned out of Sundance, but Samuel Goldwyn acquired it from a new division called Lifetime Films, and that's exactly what it is: a woman-centered, Lifetime TV movie with a big-screen cast.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

The Stanford Prison Experiment





Kyle Patrick Alvarez's "The Stanford Prison Experiment" is not a documentary but a dramatization of Philip Zimbardo's August 1971 psychological study in which 24 male students were chosen from 75 volunteers ($15 a day was quite the lure back then) to serve as the guards and prisoners at a fictitious three-cell prison in the basement hallways and cleared-out offices of the university's Jordan Hall.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Irrational Man, Mr. Holmes

Irrational Man
Mr. Holmes





Murder is fun in Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man,” which takes a while to get revved up but builds great comic momentum – and an inexorable logical argument for selective homicide as a societal good – in a special last half-hour that relegates the trifling “Magic in the Moonlight” to evanescent memory.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Trainwreck


 



Watching Judd Apatow’s “Trainwreck,” I had the same feeling I had at Paul Feig’s “Bridesmaids” five years ago (or Martin Brest’s “Beverly Hills Cop” 30 years ago): revelation.