The Interview, A Most Violent Year, Cake

The Interview

Cake

A Most Violent Year

Capsule reviews on three of the last four films of 2014. Only “Leviathan” remains and I’ll see it tonight.

Interstellar, Diplomacy

Interstellar

Diplomacy





Watching "Interstellar" is like sitting through a seminar in astrophysics at the Maharishi University.

Zero Dark Thirty

Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow returns to the military arena with the hard-charging, globetrotting Osama Bin Laden manhunt "Zero Dark Thirty," which, if it were a figure skater, would get full marks for technical proficiency and more moderate scores for artistic expression. The film is a considerable achievement, but next time out I'll be looking for more heart and soul from this talented director.

Lawless

Give me a well-made genre movie any day of the week over a capital-F Film with unrealized pretensions to art. “Lawless” knows exactly what it is: a family-of-moonshiners crime saga set in the Prohibition-era mountains of Virginia, with a good simpering fop of a villain, a love interest or two, and a healthy helping of humor. Shia LaBeouf makes a serviceable lead as Jack Bondurant, the keen, puppyish younger brother to Tom Hardy’s Forrest, the opaque and obstreperous leader of this stilling syndicate (Forrest doesn’t so much talk to another person as grunt in his or her general direction). Hardy, hamstrung by his mask as Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises,” has the chance to show command of the screen here, and does.