Ridley Scott’s twenty-four-year-old modern classic, “Gladiator,” succeeded due to an […]

Less a modern Western than an inside look at Hollywood’s fragile psychology, the film “The Magnificent Seven” is a lesson in the way that the movies think at the moment. It’s an encouraging thing, and a more honest historical assessment, to re-create an Old West posse with minorities in major roles. It’s another thing to be so perfectly, comically and distractingly fancied up with diversity that a focus group seems like

In "Flight," for which he collaborates with director Robert Zemeckis for the first time, Denzel Washington combines the skills of a pilot-ninja with the substance abuse problems of a Lindsay Lohan. Clearly the director and the actor working together make for great chemistry thanks to their respective skill sets) and yet, “Flight” leaves you wishing for more. Washington's Captain Whip Whitaker is no stranger to boozing and snorting cocaine

Yet "Unstoppable" isn’t really a movie about a runaway train. It’s a movie about a runaway society. Like domino it portrays a rapidly-changing America struggling with disintegrating institutions and identities. It’s set in fossilizing towns of blue-collar Pennsylvania, focusing on a rusting railway industry that once signified American industrial power. Now it seems like a leftover of the past.

Denzel Washington vs. Gary Oldman sounded like a quality action […]

Man on Fire is also a film about fractured perspectives and subjectivity. Pelham likewise. Everyone can see a bit of the picture, but no one sees the whole. The villains are in total command in their own capsule but look out upon only lurking darkness. Snipers see their targets but not the hostages. Garber is involved via computers and technology, but cannot see the real thing. For Scott, cameras and computer screens function toward reality in ways like mirrors have functioned toward characters in classical cinema – as indicators of division. The technology allows us to commune around an event but also forces us into a distorted fragments of its reality. It lets us see the elephant but only feel the tail.