Joseph Kosinski’s “Only the Brave” is a deeply moving recounting of the events leading up to the death of 19 firefighters, known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots, while trying to protect the small town of Yarnell, Arizona, in 2013. A series of events put the crack firefighting team in the path of a massive fire that overwhelmed them, leaving only one survivor.
Commissioned by his son, producer Jonathan Cavendish – who plays a minor role in the film – and directed by Jonathan Cavendish’s business partner, actor Andy Serkis, the movie has the tone of a eulogy delivered by a dutiful son: affectionate, complimentary and maudlin.
Director Dean Devlin and co-writer Paul Guyot have taken a passable action film and buried it under a tsunami of political muck. Politics can work – even in an action movie – but each smart twist needs to be followed by an even smarter turn.
It has everything: a star-studded cast, a blockbuster best-selling Scandinavian murder novel by Jo Nesbx, and three time Oscar winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker. So why is “The Snowman” such a jumbled nonsensical mess?
The “Independence Day” actor was the recipient of the Excellence in Acting Award at the Woodstock Film Festival last Saturday night in Kingston, in New York’s Hudson Valley. As Pullman began to speak, he jostled the lectern, causing the award to topple to the floor and break in two pieces.
This weekend the “Groundhog Day”-like horror pic “Happy Death Day” scored a first-place finish, surpassing expectations and blowing the much costlier and star-driven “Blade Runner 2049” out of the water.
Chan co-stars as a man seeking vengeance for the death of his daughter in a bloody London bombing. His counterpart is a grizzled former 007 himself, Pierce Brosnan, growling his way into a meaty and morally ambiguous role as former IRA member and Irish Deputy Minister Liam Hennessy, attempting to politick his way around the aftermath of the bombing, which is claimed by a rouge IRA cell.
“The Princess Bride” has it all: romance, comedy, swashbuckling, wizards, bad guys, good guys, pirates, a vocabulary-challenged Sicilian, a princess, rodents of unusual size, one very large man and the most dedicated vengeance-seeker of all time.
It’s tempting to frame the career of social-justice pioneer Dolores Huerta in the context of her partnership with Cesar Chavez, with whom she founded the United Farm Workers of America. Tempting, but wrong, as argued in “Dolores,” a new documentary that spotlights her central role, outside of the labor leader’s shadow, in the fight for workers’ rights.
Thurgood Marshall – the pioneering civil rights lawyer who argued Brown vs. Board of Education and became the first African-American Supreme Court justice – deservedly receives the biopic treatment with “Marshall,” directed by Reginald Hudlin and starring Chadwick Boseman.
“Happy Death Day,” the story of a woman who’s caught in an endless loop of her own death, follows in the footsteps of “Get Out” by taking familiar elements from the horror genre but delivering the scares with more wit, wisdom and wonder.
