Image: Focus Features
Chris Luckett
Animated masterpieces are few and far between. There are a lot of really good animated films, but the truly brilliant works come along so rarely, they make you sit up and take notice, in a way only the best of cinema can. Kubo and the Two Strings, the latest stop-motion movie from animation studio Laika, is one such achievement.
Photo: Universal Pictures
Chris Luckett
The Coen Brothers are an odd breed. They’re brilliant filmmakers, as their combined 28 Oscar nominations stand as testament to. But like Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowskis, they can be their own worst enemies sometimes.
So long as they treat the script and characters as the most important pieces of the picture, they invariably spin gold. (See: Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski.) Whenever their visual eye and compulsion for cinematic homage take precedence, though, their movies end up misfires at best and forgettable at worst. (See: The Hudsucker Proxy, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Ladykillers.)
Hail, Caesar!, the brothers’ first mainstream movie since 2010’s True Grit and their first “goofy” comedy since 2008’s Burn After Reading, has all the pieces to have been one of their greats. Unfortunately, they’re lost in a sea of half-sketched scenarios and overlong set pieces. Continue reading
Photo: Columbia Pictures
Chris Luckett
A friend once theorized to me that it takes every James Bond actor three movies to “become” Bond, which is largely why Goldfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Skyfall were the respective best of Connery’s, Moore’s, and Craig’s (so far) turns in the tux. (Brosnan was the only one to hit it out of the park his very first time with GoldenEye, but then he’d already spent five seasons practicing on Remington Steele.)
Of course, as strong as those entries in the series were, they were each followed by movies that tried so hard to be bigger and better they ultimately took on too much. Thunderball was at least a half-hour too long, Moonraker remains a low-point of the 53-year-old franchise, and even the above-average Tomorrow Never Dies remains the most forgettable entry of the Brosnan years.
The question was never whether Spectre would be worse than 2012’s Skyfall, arguably the very best in the everlasting series; it was how close to those same lofty heights Spectre could reach. Thanks to the return of director Sam Mendes, some gripping action sequences, and a perfectly pitched performance from Christoph Waltz, the answer is: pretty damned close. Continue reading
Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Chris Luckett
Wes Anderson is the most visually distinctive film director since Stanley Kubrick. Other than his first film, the six that followed — Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom — all looked similarly idiosyncratic to the point of being immediately identifiable, even just by a still frame, as “Andersonian.” His eighth feature, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is at once a typical Wes Anderson movie and also something much more.
The Apple Box 