Johnny Depp was at one time one of the most sought out and best actors in Hollywood. He would consistently give great performances in good and sometimes great movies, which allowed the actor to earn back-to-back Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in 2003 and 2004, as well as a nomination in 2007. But lately, Depp has been on a streak of duds. With movies like Dark Shadows (2012), The Lone Ranger (2013), and Transcendence…
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With Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, starring Johnny Depp as infamous gangster Whitey Bulger as he runs the streets of Boston in the 1970’s, coming out this Friday, let’s look back at some of the best movies set in Boston. 5- Fever Pitch (The Farrelly Brothers, 2005) I could have gone with better overall films like the rousing The Fighter (2010), the extremely entertaining The Boondock Saints (1999) or one of the great Paul Newman…
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We have seen movies about the quarter-life crises, like The Graduate (1967), Garden State (2004), and The Worlds End (2013). We have seen midlife-crises movies like 8 1/2 (1963), American Beauty (1999), and The Incredibles (2004). What we don’t see a lot of, however, is the three-quarter life crises movie. We rarely see movies about people in their elder years looking back at life and realizing, after seeing friends and loved ones die, that they haven’t fulfilled…
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When comedic actors venture into drama, it can go one of two ways. They can be great, like Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love (2002) or Steve Carrell in Foxcatcher (2014). Or, they can be terrible, like Vince Vaughn in Psycho (1998) or Jim Carrey in The Number 23 (2007). So when I heard that Jason Segel of Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) and How I Met Your Mother fame was stepping into the dramatic world as author…
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Straight Outta Compton, was another film I could not wait to see in 2015. In fact, it was number three on my Most Anticipated Films of 2015 behind only J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman (2014) follow-up, The Revenant. The trailers for the film were electric, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube were godfathering the film, the cast looked good, the director was established, and the music was…
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Southpaw was a film I could not wait to see. It was number nine on my Most Anticipated Films of 2015 list that I made at the beginning of the year. It had everything going for it. An established director in Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, 2001), an incredible cast, including Rachel McAdams, Oscar winner Forrest Whitaker, and a jacked Jake Gyllenhaal, excellent marketing and trailers, and a soundtrack produced by Eminem. Sadly, the film did…
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Amy is a look at the life of troubled artist Amy Winehouse, from the early days to her downfall into drugs, alcohol, and her eventual death at the young age of 27. I did not know a lot about Winehouse before going into this movie. I thought that she was just another artist who couldn’t handle the rockstar life style. But director Asif Kapadia has given us a much deeper story than that. The first…
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I don’t go to the movies to see bad movies. I don’t ever want a movie to be bad because then it just wastes my time and money. But, Terminator Genisys was one I had a bad feeling about from the beginning. From the awful, spoilerific trailer, to the current state of Hollywood, and the casting, this movie had all the makings to fail. I don’t want to toot my own horn or anything, but…
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2012’s Magic Mike was one of the best surprises I have ever had going to the movies. A film that was advertised as Channing Tatum and a patsy of strippers getting hot, wild, and naked amongst a sea of women was actually a personal character study about a man looking to find himself and a career with very limited stripping. A lot of women were disappointed, I was not. Well now Tatum and the patsy are…
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When I write my reviews, usually I will write about the movie a few hours after seeing it. I gather my thoughts and let the movie simmer so I can compile a full, cohesive opinion of the movie. After seeing the documentary The Wolfpack, which I saw earlier this week, I was unable to write my review right away due to other obligations I needed to attend to. Initially, my thoughts on the Sundance Film…
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