HMV Closes

The HMV in my town closes its doors for good today. The retail shutdown has been coming for awhile, as predicted by other location closings in the west, and I've dropped by the store on Spring Garden a couple of times since the Nothing Held Back! Sale has been happening. And I think I've figured…Read More

Jack Reacher review

Directed and written by Christopher McQuarrie, adapting the Lee Child book, One Shot.A sad coincidence, I suppose, that I'm writing about Jack Reacher today, and earlier I heard of the death of Michael Winner, a British director who was responsible for a number of thrillers and action movies of the 1970s, movies Jack Reacher is directly…Read More

The Last Stand review

Directed by Kim Jee-WoonWritten by Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff and George NolfiOnce upon a time, action movies were different. In the 1980s, the guns were big, the explosions were big, the heroes were big, but CGI and superheroes weren't yet king. The star was still the biggest part of the deal: Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell,…Read More

Top 10 Movies of 2012

Welcome to a post collecting the names and details of films that wowed me through the 12 months of last year, typically arriving late as I caught up with everything I wanted to see. My criteria for inclusion are as follows: List-worthiness for me is a strange equation of cerebral and emotional, as much as…Read More

Zero Dark Thirty review

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Written by Mark Boal In the opening scenes of Zero Dark Thirty, following the text that the film is "based on first-hand accounts of actual events," Jason Clarke's CIA agent, the single-named Dan, is interrogating a prisoner at some Black Site, an American ops location without an address, somewhere in Pakistan. They're…Read More

Django Unchained review

Written and directed by Quentin TarantinoI suppose it was inevitable that Tarantino would get grief about his movie Django Unchained, a western that takes place in the antebellum south. It's a grand adventure that borrows a lot from Sergio Leone, but with no hesitation in the script to use what we all euphemistically call "the…Read More