movies Page 12 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Professional: Donald E. Westlake
Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) was one of our most prolific and entertaining writers. Now, we've got this posthumous treat: The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, published by the University of Chicago Press and edited by Levi Stahl. The book is a ton of fun. I recently had the ch...
Why Paul Newman Just Got Better With Age
This week's curation at the Beast is Peter Richmond's fine 1995 GQ profile of Paul Newman:...
Words, Movies And Out Of Africa
From By the Book, the weekly Q&A series at the Times Book Review, dig this from Jodi Picoult:...
Here's What I Learned Watching FIFA's Incredible Propaganda Movie
Recently, soccer fans all over the world were impressed to learn that United Passions, a FIFA-financed movie about how wonderful FIFA is starring Gérard Depardieu, Sam Neill, and Tim Roth, had pulled in $200,000 at the box office since it premiered at Cannes in May. This sum may be a bit less than t...
<em>Blue Ruin</em> Is A Great Revenge Thriller About How Dumb Revenge Is
Every revenge movie eventually has to address the idea that, hey, maybe revenge is a really bad idea, that maybe you shouldn't organize your entire life around killing the person who wronged you. Usually, this notion is rejected immediately: A supporting character will say something like, "Wait, you...
<em>The Man From Nowhere</em> Is The Fucked-Up South Korean Blockbuster For You
The villains of the 2010 South Korean movie The Man From Nowhere are bad, bad people. How bad? They kidnap unwanted kids for use as drug-lab slave labor. When one passes out in the smack sweatshop, a heavy rolls his eyes and says, "Kids are so dramatic." Then he barks at the rest of 'em to get back ...
<em>Face/Off</em> Is Even Weirder And Radder Than You Remember
The great Hong Kong action director John Woo got to make a handful of English-language movies during his '90s Hollywood period. But he only ever got to make one true John Woo Movie here. That'd be 1997's Face/Off, an absolute nutball mega-budget pileup of all his favorite images (guys flying thr...
You Need More Bruce Lee In Your Life; Start With <em>The Chinese Connection</em>
The most iconic moment in 1972's Bruce Lee vehicle The Chinese Connection, and maybe of his entire career, comes when he walks into a Japanese dojo with a sign that the Japanese, as an insult, left at his teacher's funeral. He says he'll take on anyone in the dojo, and when one guy steps up, Lee s...
Watch This Bonkers <em>Universal Soldier</em> Sequel, But Skip The First Scene
Universal Soldier, you may remember, was a blast of pure 1992 cheese in which Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren play reanimated Vietnam super-soldiers who fight each other. It was pretty good! It was, in fact, the only pretty good movie ever made by German director Roland Emmerich, and its su...
Once Upon A Time In American Film
I had a subscription to American Film magazine from say 1982-86 and was happy to see this over at the great Cinephilia and Beyond. ...
The Gonzo <em>District B13</em> Proves That Parkour Was Good For Something
Right now, someone, somewhere, is trying to turn Ice Bucket Challenge: The Movie into a thing. That's how it works: These little movements bubble up from nowhere, briefly seize the collective imagination, and then disappear in a ball of smoke before some asshole figures out a way to monetize the t...
Toronto Film Festival 2014: 10 Movies We Can't Wait To See
The Toronto Film Festival, which starts Thursday, is always excellent one-stop shopping for many of the major films hoping to crash the Oscar and best-of-the-year conversations. Beyond the world premieres, it also features the best of what played at Cannes, as well as plenty of films that alread...
Gene Hackman Does Rambo: The Emo Machismo Of <em>Uncommon Valor</em>
Gene Hackman made a Rambo movie, and only a year after the original. Maybe it's best to think of 1983's Uncommon Valor as the missing link between The Deer Hunter and the first Rambo sequel, two extremely fucking different takes on the idea that there are still prisoners of war in Vietnam, and we ne...
The Best And Worst 2014 Summer Movies: A Grierson And Leitch Report
If you ask the bean-counters, this was a disappointing summer: Almost every major sequel underperformed (Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Expendables 3, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were all the lowest-grossing entries in their respective series), and there were some truly ugly flops, most n...
<em>The Heroic Trio</em>: A Female-Superhero Classic For Stoners Everywhere
Recently, news circulated that we are finally getting a full movie about a female superhero. It's going to be a spinoff of the current not-great Spider-Man series, and we don't yet know if the female superhero in question is going to be Spider-Woman or Silver Sable or the Black Cat or what. It's a f...
<em>Safe</em> Is The Best Jason Statham Movie
You can learn a lot about someone from his or her favorite Jason Statham movie. For instance, if your pick is Crank (or, fucking hell, Crank 2), I know you don't really like Jason Statham movies that much. Those are built on a fun concept, and they have a few great ideas, but they're Mountain Dew co...
Anchor Name-Drops 22 Robin Williams Movies In His Sportscast
On Monday night, Zach Klein of WSB-TV in Atlanta paid his own little tribute to Robin Williams by slipping the titles of a whole bunch of the late actor's movies into his 150-second sportscast:...
Drive Angrier: The Bleak Mayhem Of Mel Gibson's Original <em>Mad Max</em>
For someone who's never been to Comic-Con, the whole idea seems a bit baffling—waiting in line all day to attend a half-hour promotional junket for a movie that won't be out for another year, getting to say you were there when Robert Downey, Jr. said he had a pretty good time making this next Aven...
Does <em>Sharknado</em> Crack The Shitty Movie Hall Of Fame?
There's been a lot of press surrounding last night's Syfy debut of Sharknado 2: The Second One. Which makes sense, given that last year's original was a smash success (as far as these types of movies go), and the sequel takes place in New York, where there's not just a high concentration of media ...