[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.

[Review] – A Late Quartet

Title: A Late Quartet
Year: 2012
Director: Yaron Zilberman
Writers: Seth Grossman and Yaron Zilberman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener, Mark Ivanir, Imogen Poots, Wallace Shawn
MPAA Rating: R, language and some sexuality
Runtime: 105 min
IMDb Rating: 6.0
Rotten Tomatoes: 77%
Metacritic: 67

Near the end of this year a film called Quartet will come out and make a limited theatrical run in order to qualify for awards consideration. That film is Dustin Hoffman‘s directorial debut, stars amazing actors like Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon, focusses on a retirement home for opera musicians and looks pretty great. That film’s not to be confused with the one that’s out now, A Late Quartet, which may not have the big-name director (this is Yaron Zilberman‘s feature debut) but that does have amazing actors, including Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Walken and is also pretty great.

[Review] – Seven Psychopaths

Title: Seven Psychopaths
Year: 2012
Director: Martin McDonagh
Writer: Martin McDonagh
Starring: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko, Gabourey Sidibe, Kevin Corrigan, Zeljko Ivanek, Michael Pitt, Michael Stuhlbarg, Harry Dean Stanton
MPAA Rating: R, strong violence, bloody images, pervasive language, sexuality/nudity and some drug use
Runtime: 110 min
IMDb Rating: 8.0
Rotten Tomatoes: 85%
Metacritic: 66

Martin McDonagh is (inarguably, really) one of the very best living playwrights we have today. The Irishman is the author of the Leenane Trilogy as well as the Aran Islands Trilogy of plays, not to mention The Pillowman and A Behanding in Spokane, and four of his works have received Tony Award nominations for Best Play. Then in 2005 he made Six Shooter, a 27-minute short film starring Brendan Gleeson that won him an Oscar for Best Live Action Short which he would use as a launching pad for In Bruges, his first feature-length effort that would come in 2008 and that would see him reunite with Mr. Gleeson.

[Trailer] – Seven Psychopaths

If I had to make a list of the ten movies left this year that I’m most highly anticipating, Seven Psychopaths would surely rank among them. Thankfully it’s only a couple of months until we get to see it, and it’s just gotten a trailer which you can watch after the cut.

[Review] – Dark Horse

Title: Dark Horse
Year: 2012
Director: Todd Solondz
Writer: Todd Solondz
Starring: Jordan Gelber, Selma Blair, Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow, Justin Bartha
MPAA Rating: Not rated
Runtime: 84 min
IMDb Rating: 6.6
Rotten Tomatoes: 73%
Metacritic: 66

It was only a few years ago, in 2009, when I was introduced to the work of Todd Solondz. I remember reading that he had a film called Life During Wartime premiering at that year’s Venice International Film Festival, which was a semi-sequel of sorts to another film of his, 1998’s Happiness. So I thought I should check out his stuff, and I started at the beginning, with 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, which blew me away, and then the aforementioned Happiness, which I found to be even better. Those two films still stand to this day as two of the best films of the nineties, in my opinion.