Let’s face it: America has a zombie problem. They’ve invaded our TV shows, our films, our commercials, our toy shelves, our seasonal pop-up Halloween stores, not to mention the takeover of comic-book shelves and bookstores. According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, there have been 70 zombie movies since 1980 — 23 of them since 2012. So Black Summer, …
Author: Scott Bowles
Nearly 50 years ago, Dr. Edwin Land, the genius who invented the Polaroid/Land Camera, made a cryptic short film — just him in a lab coat wandering through a gutted factory talking about the future of cameras. He pulled out a wallet that looked like an iPhone for size comparison and spoke of “a camera …
Ricky Gervais flourishes in the awkward moment: the uncomfortable silence of a stiff conversation; a tasteless joke that lands with a thud; the boss who tries too hard to impress employees. That all-too-familiar discomfit works magically on his TV shows and his four stints hosting the Golden Globes, and less smoothly in his scripted films, …
Sports makes for natural cinema. You’ve got the underdog hero, the heavily-favored villain, the climactic clash, the clear-cut winner and loser. That’s what fueled Rocky to eight films and $800 million at the box office in the U.S. alone. But many forget: Rocky lost the first championship fight. And losing can make for equally compelling viewing. …
HBO’s finale to True Detective hasn’t seen this much controversy since the end of The Sopranos, which is fitting, because both ended on anticlimactic notes. Throughout its eight-year run, The Sopranos suggested that death was sudden blackness, an unexpected and unexplained exit from existence. To prove the point, Sopranos capped its own fans, ending the series in such sudden …
You can tell Netflix is feeling its big-studio oats by the fights it’s accepting. First came the clash with major Hollywood studios with Roma, which is vying to become the first streaming service film to win Best Picture when the Oscars are handed out February 24. Then it won the bidding war at Sundance …
Roma‘s 10 Oscar nominations underscored not only the streaming service’s growing clout in Hollywood, but confirmed what analysts have been noticing since it hit airwaves a dozen years ago: Netflix is altering almost everything we view, from movies to TV shows to viral videos. Despite its fourth — and biggest — price hike in its …
As Michael Clayton and Nightcrawler illustrated, Dan Gilroy is masterful at portraying the horrific underbelly of human nature. When it comes to outright horror, though, his artistic style seems a little rough around the edges. Such is the mixed result of his fun-but-flawed latest work, Velvet Buzzsaw, which premiered at Sundance last week before …
High Flying Bird fittingly resembles a no-look pass in basketball: unexpected, deftly maneuvered, and usually resulting in a score. And while Steven Soderbergh’s latest movie accomplishes most of the achievements of the flashy pass — including a score — it isn’t quite a slam dunk. There’s no denying the basketball drama was unexpected, on a …
Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s latest masterpiece, wears several hats: It’s part homage to his Mexican upbringing, part love poem to his nanny and part examination of the political and social schisms of his country in the 1970s. It’s also something of a Hollywood double agent. The black-and-white film, which is garnering substantial Oscar buzz, underscores the …
The Hollywood Bowles 