After a promising spring, moviegoers endured the lousiest summer movie season in memory. The “big dumb fun” movies didn’t deliver but several great, challenging fall dramas and a few sleepers from earlier salvaged the movie year. The great runner-ups that got pushed outside of my Top Ten are A Monster Calls (opening next month), Kubo […]
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN New Movie Review
The key to Antoine Fuqua’s remake of John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (which is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai) is that it genuinely loves the western genre. Although westerns were, at one point, second only to musicals as the most popular type of movie, their appearance in movie theaters is now awfully […]
Mauitime 2016 Fall Movie Preview
The fall movie season, with its acclaimed film festival favorites and prestige Oscar candidates, is looking like a nice alternative to 2016’s Bummer Summer. To misquote a classic Christopher Walken SNL sketch, if the past movie summer was a cowbell, the fall season of cinema is the aspirin. Here’s the best of the lot that isn’t […]