Author: Bob Westal

Among actors under the age of 18 or so, it’s hard to think of anyone more in demand, more talented, or more justly acclaimed right now than 13 year-old Chloe Moretz. Her most high-profile performance to date – as the mass-killing, C- and F-word spouting Hit-Girl in the highly entertaining “Kick-Ass” – has aroused a certain amount of criticism from the usual conservative groups, who tended to focus on the cursing, and more liberal critics like Roger Ebert, who was appalled by the idea of such a young person involved as both perpetrator and victim of ultra-violence – even if…

With credits dating back to the 1980s and “The New Leave it to Beaver,” Giovanni Ribisi has grown up on screen. At 36, he’s one of the most reliable and in-demand actors around, even if his youthful face – currently embellished by the addition of a thin mustache and soul patch – is a lot more widely recognized than his name. Indeed, even if you think you’ve never heard his him, you’ve likely spent several hours watching him. Among scads of other roles, he was the unobtainium-driven corporate tool of “Avatar,” Scarlett Johansson’s feckless husband in “Lost in Translation,” the…

He would disagree, but it’s a bit unfortunate that Gabriel Macht is probably best known as the star of Frank Miller’s 2008 version of “The Spirit.” He is a highly experienced and trained second-generation actor with numerous stage credits – including the part of “the Visitor,” aka Elvis Presley, in Steve Martin’s historical fantasia, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” – as well as a variety of big and small screen acting credits, including starring in the short-lived NBC series opposite Julianne Nicholson, 2000’s “The Others,” and costarring with Owen Wilson and Gene Hackman in 2001’s “Behind Enemy Lines.” There’s certainly…

If you are one of the very rare people who saw Paul Schrader’s film, “The Walker,” or for that matter read Jonathan Ames’ 1998 novel, The Extra Man, you know that a class of men exist who are not gigolos but who do provide aging society ladies with a much needed service. Simply by being male and socially acceptable, they assist dowagers in maintaining boy-girl-boy-girl seating at their heavily dated, Brideshead Revisited-esque dinner parties. In return, they get to eat fine food, attend expensive performances, and generally be accorded the privileges of a hanger-on. Since Paul Schrader comes from a…

With long hair and a never-trimmed beard, Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) is the kind of local character all American small towns seem to have, at least in the movies. An ornery and possibly violent hermit, he has no problem firing his gun into the air and scaring the hell out of any small boys who might stray onto his property on a dare. Fortunately for his Depression-era Tennessee town, this isn’t a horror flick, so he doesn’t descend into cannibalism or start chopping up local floozies. That’s a good thing, too, because there really was a Felix Bush. Instead, Bush…

There are happy people and there are miserable people. What makes some of us a member of one group or the other was the topic of UK director Mike Leigh’s 2008’s “Happy-Go-Lucky.” That realistic comedy pitted a charming but ridiculously upbeat schoolteacher played by Sally Hawkins against a psychotically misanthropic driving instructor played by Eddie Marsan. Leigh’s latest looks at a similar contrast, but in the context of friends and family instead of teacher and teached. Civil service therapist Gerri (Ruth Sheen) is comfortable dealing with the most extreme sorts of human personalities while remaining calm and pleasant herself. Indeed,…

How’s this for a moral dilemma? You’re an up-by-his-bootstraps industrialist at war with your corporate colleagues. They want to ruin the company that means everything to you by making shoddy goods. That’s okay. You’ll soon be able to sideline them all because you have a secret: you’ve been buying stock on the sly for years, and will shortly gain majority control. In fact, you’ve got the last installment in your hand — cold cash gained by mortgaging all your possessions. Then, just as the transaction is about to be completed, a phone caller tells you that your son has been…

It was very, very far from being the first Hollywood Western, nor is it necessarily the best movie Western, and it’s certainly not the most original Western. In fact, many of its characters and situations were clichés even back in 1939. It is, however, the Western that, more than any other film, set the pattern for all the classic-era movie Westerns that came after. Whether or not you’ve ever even seen it, when you think of an old school Hollywood Western, you’re at least partially thinking of John Ford’s “Stagecoach.” It didn’t exactly reinvent the genre, but it showed what…

In 1951, the Southern American Nobel laureate William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead; It’s not even past.” It’s a favorite quote of Barack Obama when talking about the history of race and culture in America, and it’s just those kind of obvious historical resonances that are nearly unavoidable as you watch the rough but memorable first action-drama film directed by Taiwan-born Ang Lee. All but buried on its initial release for reasons that remain somewhat vague, the director of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “The Ice Storm,” and, yes, “Hulk,” has re-edited the film for a Criterion edition that…

Children might fear bogeymen or ghosts (or, in the case of this writer’s son, gorillas), but adults know that the most sinister things come in nondescript packaging, which is what makes the premise for “The Joneses” positively terrifying on paper. The family next door is actually a group of stealth marketers in disguise? That’s bad juju, right there. However, to execute such a ruse would take coordination, nerves of steel and, frankly, a group of sociopaths. These Joneses, of course, aren’t sociopaths, and in fact once you peel back the first layer, they turn out to be the worst employees…