Film
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: The Place Beyond the Pines (R) This drama written and directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) stars Ryan Gosling as a bank robber on a collision course with an ambitious young police officer (Bradley Cooper). Als...
Florence Nightingale
Heavy themes weigh down the portentous road trip thriller Tomorrow You’re Gone.KRISTIAN LIN
Lacking much in the way of star power, Tomorrow You’re Gone might well be a mystery to audiences when it opens this Friday in Grapevine. I wish I could say that the low-budget entry balances thrills and gravitas well enough t...
Dual Blazes
Fort Worth brothers balance their filmmaking careers with high school.KRISTIAN LIN
Conducting a phone interview with the Blaze brothers turns out to be somewhat difficult. It’s not because 18-year-old Nathan and 17-year-old Jon are reluctant to talk. It’s just that their voices sound rather similar, and t...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: G.I. Joe: Retaliation (PG-13) The sequel to the 2010 action movie has the remnants of the commando force being hunted by their own government after the president (Jonathan Pryce) is kidnapped and replaced by a master o...
Watch the Woman, Not The Girl
This border drama boasts a better lead performance than it merits.KRISTIAN LIN
Abbie Cornish is from Australia, and yet something about her makes filmmakers think of Texas. The blonde, apple-cheeked beauty already played a small-town Texas girl in Stop-Loss, and now she returns to the Lone Star State in T...
The No Has It
¡Adiós, Presidente! An adman beats a dictator in this hot Chilean satire.KRISTIAN LIN
Where advertising and politics meet, movies usually turn cynical and satiric. Political ads foul our airwaves, reduce complex policies to soundbites, pander to our unspoken prejudices and fears, and convince us to vote for dema...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: On the Road (R) Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) adapts Jack Kerouac’s novel about a young writer (Sam Riley) who takes a road trip across America with his best friend (Garrett Hedlund) and his new girlfriend (...
Stoker: India and Korea
Your family is nowhere near as messed up as the one in this chiller.KRISTIAN LIN
A few months ago, I wrote about the wave of South Korean filmmakers coming to America. That wave reaches much higher tide with Stoker, a slow-churning, delicately crafted psychological thriller that crawls under your skin. The ...
I Accept Admission
Tina Fey gives it the old college try in this comedy.KRISTIAN LIN
Like all right-thinking persons, I adore Tina Fey. Yet for all her glorious work on TV, she still hasn’t made the great comedy film that we all know her to be capable of. Her latest, Admission, falls agonizingly short of grea...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: The Call (R) Halle Berry stars in this thriller as a 911 operator who becomes obsessed with stopping a serial killer whom she has encountered in the past. Also with Abigail Breslin, Morris Chestnut, Michael Eklund, Dav...