[Review] – Not Fade Away

Title: Not Fade Away
Year: 2012
Director: David Chase
Writer: David Chase
Starring: John Magaro, Bella Heathcote, Will Brill, Jack Huston, Brad Garrett, James Gandolfini, Christopher McDonald
MPAA Rating: R, pervasive language, some drug use and sexual content
Runtime: 112 min
IMDb Rating: 5.6
Rotten Tomatoes: 79%
Metacritic: 68

David Chase is a man known mostly, of course, for his work on television. He worked on The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure, but of course he’ll be forever immortalized as the man who created The Sopranos. It really is hard to overstate the impact that series had on the current television landscape, being the biggest factor in having HBO become the absolute critical behemoth it still is, and really being the series that helped pave the way for the Golden Age of Television, without which shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad probably would have never come to fruition.

[Review] – Amour

Title: Amour
Year: 2012
Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert
MPAA Rating: PG-13, mature thematic material including a disturbing act, and for brief language
Runtime: 127 min
IMDb Rating: 8.1
Rotten Tomatoes: 92%
Metacritic: 93

Michael Haneke is, of course, one of those absolute masters in the art of cinema. The stuff he does with his films, putting forward a rather dark and often disturbing approach to deal with problematic issues of society, is just stunning to behold and puts him in that rare league of filmmakers that every single film he puts out I will be first in line to check it out. From The Piano Teacher to Caché to The White Ribbon, seeing a Michael Haneke film is an experience that really gets to you.

[Review] – The Guilt Trip

Title: The Guilt Trip
Year: 2012
Director: Anne Fletcher
Writer: Dan Fogelman
Starring: Barbra Streisand, Seth Rogen, Brett Cullen, Adam Scott, Ari Graynor, Casey Wilson, Colin Hanks, Yvonne Strahovski
MPAA Rating: PG-13, language and some risque material
Runtime: 95 min
IMDb Rating: 5.4
Rotten Tomatoes: 37%
Metacritic: 51

Anne Fletcher started out in Hollywood as a choreographer and, because of that, went on to direct Step Up in 2006, which was, of course, a big box office hit that pretty much helped launch Channing Tatum‘s career. She followed that up with 27 Dresses and The Proposal, two romantic comedies that also made a killing at the box office (especially the latter) and is now back on the director’s chair with another comedy, though this time not based on a romance but instead on a mother-son relationship, called The Guilt Trip. Though, after seeing how this one’s been tracking in its first few days of release, it doesn’t seem like it will be the big commercial hit her previous films have been.

[Review] – Save The Date

Title: Save the Date
Year: 2012
Director: Michael Mohan
Writers: Egan Reich, Jeffrey Brown and Michael Mohan
Starring: Lizzy Caplan, Alison Brie, Martin Starr, Geoffrey Arend, Mark Webber
MPAA Rating: R, sexual content, language and brief drug use
Runtime: 98 min
IMDb Rating: 4.5
Rotten Tomatoes: 46%
Metacritic: 54

Save the Date is my first encounter with the work of writer-director Michael Mohan (his only other feature-length effort is a 2010 flick called One Too Many Mornings), and though the film, which first screened at Sundance earlier this year, isn’t particularly great I can’t help but just giving him all the kudos in the world for being able to get so many cool people in his cast. I mean, seriously, this film is just adequate, you could say, just a totally lightweight kind of entertainment but one that’s totally watchable because of the tremendously likable cast it assembled.

[Trailer] – The Place Beyond The Pines

I cannot express how much I love Blue Valentine, a film which I ranked as the fourth best of all 2010, so the fact that Ryan Gosling is reuniting with director Derek Cianfrance for next year’s The Place Beyond the Pines is ridiculously exciting to me. There’s now a trailer for that film, which you can watch below.

[Review] – Any Day Now

Title: Any Day Now
Year: 2012
Director: Travis Fine
Writers: Travis Fine and George Arthur Bloom
Starring: Alan Cumming, Garret Dillahunt, Isaac Leyva, Frances Fisher
MPAA Rating: R, sexual content, language and some drug use
Runtime: 97 min
IMDb Rating: 6.8
Rotten Tomatoes: 90%
Metacritic: 60

Any Day Now is a film that stars two actors who are currently rocking their roles in two of the best shows network television has to offer. On the one hand you have Alan Cumming, twice Emmy-nominated for his role as Eli Gold on CBS‘ The Good Wife, on the other you have Garret Dillahunt, who stars as Burt Chance on on Fox‘s Raising Hope, the kind of show that won’t really garner that much Emmy attention (he’s also had supporting roles in some terrific movies like No Country For Old Men and, most recently, both Looper and Killing Them Softly this year). They’re two very good actors who I really like, so I was intrigued to see them team up on the big screen.

[Trailer] – The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

We’ve seen movies about the old school of something going against the new school of something, but we haven’t seen that done all that much in the world of magic. Well, that’s what next year’s The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is going for, and there’s now a trailer for it, which you can watch below.

[Review] – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Title: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Year: 2012
Director: Peter Jackson
Writers: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
Starring: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis, Lee Pace
MPAA Rating: PG-13, extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images
Runtime: 169 min
IMDb Rating: 8.6
Rotten Tomatoes: 65%
Metacritic: 58

Considering the magnitude of this movie it’s fair to say this review will run longer than usual. After all, this is the start to a brand new trilogy that follows (but acts as a prequel series) one of the most successful (both commercially and critically) franchises in history. Back in 2000 Peter Jackson (then known mostly for Heavenly Creatures, a very good, low budget New Zealand film) embarked on what remains to this day one of the most ambitious film projects ever undertaken, the adaptation of the three The Lord of the Rings novels by J.R.R. Tolkien getting a whopping budget of $281 million to make the trilogy of films back-to-back-to-back during a period of 438 days.

[Trailer] – The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann‘s adaptation of The Great Gatsby was originally supposed to be released a few days from now, vying for some of the awards attention. Then it was pushed back until next year’s summer which, considering the already crowded late-year slate we have right now, may have been the right move, plus the novel always felt more summery than anything, right? In any case, to tide us over until the film arrives, we’ve now have a second trailer for it, which you can watch below.

[Review] – Stand Up Guys

Title: Stand Up Guys
Year: 2012
Director: Fisher Stevens
Writer: Noah Haidle
Starring: Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Alan Arkin, Julianna Margulies, Mark Margolis, Lucy Punch
MPAA Rating: R, language, sexual content, violence and brief drug use
Runtime: 94 min
IMDb Rating: 6.4
Rotten Tomatoes: 46%
Metacritic: 41

Right, so, as you may have gathered over the past few years, movies starring older actors tailored for their contemporaries have been doing some real solid business. From The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to Red (both of which have sequels already in development) there seems to be a nice niche for movies starring older actors and targeted to older audiences. As a result we now have Stand Up Guys, a crime comedy starring a trio of acting greats that will be properly released early in 2013, so we’ll only know how this one does on the business side then, but that’s getting limited run now.