Star Trek Beyond gets ahead by going back to basics

 

Space is no longer the final frontier in cinema. In fact it’s a bit passé.

Where’s Kubrick’s star-child once evoked the wonder of journeying into the unknown, science fiction has since placed its emphasis more on the inherent risks of interstellar travel.…

Green Room is gut-wrenching, sometimes literally

 

Blue Ruin, Green Room. 

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is certainly not a director afraid to deal in primal colors: the bright green woodlands of Oregon into which down-on-their-luck punk band The Ain’t Rights stray, playing an impromptu gig to an audience of neo-Nazis; the visceral red of the horrific gore that results when band member Pat (an endearingly mumbly Anton Yelchin) stumbles upon a murder.…

Experimenter is a smart film about a smart guy

 

Writer-director Michael Almereyda enter public consciousness back in 2000 with his moody, ultramodern take on Hamlet — which featured Ethan Hawke as a suitably disaffected crown prince, complete with woolly Peruvian hat.

If something there got lost amidst the static and the skyscrapers, then his latest film, Experimenter — about social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), particularly his famed experiment into obedience to authority — is certainly more to the point.…

Star Trek Into Darkness helps bring the franchise back into the light

We are living in the New Hollywood of pop culture.

Just as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick grew up on a diet of Welles, Kazan and Hitchcock, the new generation of filmmakers – Abrams, Whedon, Nolan – were weaned on TV, sci-fi, fantasy and comic books: Star Wars was their Rashomon.…