By Susan JAMES Director Marc Webb, with the help of an able cast, has spun pure gold from the overworked tale of a boy, a spider and the birth of a superhero. With “The Amazing Spider-Man,” Webb offers us a fully fleshed out origin story that is entertaining, at times comic and always involving. Framed […]
By Susan JAMES Newbie director Anne Renton’s art market film, “The Perfect Family” is a Catholic fairy tale with a happy ending. But along the way there are a lot of bruises and bumps, some of them filmed in a familiar locale outside Honolulu Avenue shops in Montrose. Kathleen Turner plays Eileen Cleary, an obsessive-compulsive […]
By Susan JAMES The highly anticipated annual television festival PaleyFest took place during the first two weeks of March at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills. A celebration of some of television’s most popular series, PaleyFest is run by the Paley Center for Media and offers fans the unique opportunity to interact with industry stars […]
By Susan JAMES If you want to class up a swash and swagger adventure movie, there is nothing better than surrounding your lead actors with classically trained British thespians who can go from Hamlet to Hannibal in the blink of an eye. Writer-director Andrew Stanton has followed this rule in Disney’s new blow-out, $250 million […]
by Susan JAMES When Daniel Craig’s Jake Lonergan wakes up in 1873, barefoot and gunless in the scorching heat of the Arizona desert, a new screen hero is born. Like so many Western heroes before him, Lonergan is a man carved of flint, straddling both sides of the law, on a mission of revenge. […]
By Susan JAMES The cosmic collision of entertainment that was Comic-Con 2011 might have been short one “Bones” panel but it was long on drama. From the “Glee” cast controversies to the “Castle” questions about Beckett’s survival to the big “Bones” reveal of Booth and Brennan’s pregnancy, this year’s convention had a lot of fans […]
By Susan JAMES On film, it has been a long journey for Harry and for us, from 2001’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” to the final act of J. K. Rowling’s mythic drama, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,” opening this week. Together with their on-screen characters, the tenacious trio of Daniel […]
By Susan JAMES Fear not all you gamers, geeks and sci-fy seekers, the big bang that is the third installment of director Michael Bay’s “Transformers’” series is finally here. The ‘bot boys are back led by Optimus Prime on a mission to protect humanity and save planet Earth from the Decepticons. In case you don’t […]
By Susan JAMES Like all good summer popcorn movies, director Martin Campbell’s take on comic book classic “Green Lantern,” starring Ryan Reynolds, arrives on-screen with a bang and ends with a sequel. The first film since “Avatar” to use 3-D technology to its full potential, the story streaks across galaxies, loops solar systems and deletes […]
By Susan JAMES Comedy walks a fine line between hilarity and hysteria, guffaws and gross-outs and in director Todd Phillips’ eagerly awaited sequel to the 2009 megahit “The Hangover,” hysteria and gross-outs win. What was fresh, outrageous and unexpected in the original, and side-splittingly funny as well, here is forced, predictable and increasingly desperate. Two […]