‘INTERSTELLAR’ SHOOTS FOR THE STARS – AND IN MANY ASPECTS, IT GETS THERE
By Greg Popil Sooner or later, every director that truly “makes it” in the film industry, proving without a doubt that they have the kind of commercial instincts that make studios insane amounts of...
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‘DRACULA UNTOLD’ SHOULD REMAIN UNWATCHED
By Greg Popil In the world of cinema, there are characters whose stories have been told, and there are well-mined characters, and then there is Count Dracula. As the Guinness Book of World Records-...
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FINCHER WEAVES ‘GONE GIRL’ INTO A PULP MASTERPIECE
By Greg Popil A man, and a woman. A picturesque Missouri house, ripped from the pages of Better Homes and Gardens magazines. A marriage that seems like it should be the envy of the entire town. The...
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‘BOXTROLLS’ IS A DARK, TWISTED DELIGHT
By Greg Popil If the modern-day animated studios were students in a high school, Disney animation would be the established, universally respected class president, and its cousin Pixar the driven, i...
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MOVIE REVIEWS IN BRIEF: ‘Snowpiercer’! (And Some Others)
By Greg Popil (Note: Absolutely nothing interesting opened last week, so I’ve decided to go back and recap some movies from earlier this year) Snowpiercer Post-apocalyptic movies have become...
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DARKER, ANGRIER ‘SIN CITY’ SEQUEL IS HIT-AND-MISS
By Greg Popil In 2005, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller teamed up to co-direct an adaptation of Miller’s graphic novel “Sin City” and created what many people felt was an evolution in film itself. T...
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‘THE GIVER’ IS DULL, DERIVATIVE
By Greg Popil In 1993, Lois Lowry’s young-adult novel “The Giver” was an award-winning breakthrough, a book that introduced an entire generation to the type of dystopian-future literature that domina...
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‘GUARDIANS’ PUTS THE COMIC BOOK BACK IN ‘COMIC BOOK MOVIE’
By Greg Popil Given how little respect the subgenre of comic book movies receive from filmmakers, critics and audiences alike (right up until it became the most lucrative and beloved subgenre right a...
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STUNNING ‘BOYHOOD’ A MODERN MASTERPIECE
By Greg Popil Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Fight Club” has an early sequence that would be unfamiliar to fans of the film. When the narrator first encounters Tyler Durden, he is walking on a beach. Tyle...
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LUCY WRESTLES WITH BIG IDEAS
By Greg Popil You have to give director Luc Besson this much credit: He never, ever feels like he’s on autopilot. If Besson were a baseball player he would be one of those frustratingly inconsisten...
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