Author: Stephen Whitty

The romantic comedy Toss It starts with someone flipping a coin – but ultimately it’s the audience that’s the loser. The lead actress is unappealingly cold. The script is overly talky. And the director seems unsure of how to help the star, or the screenwriter, solve their problems. Of course, the fact that the director […]

Video games are not movies, but a lot of movie makers haven’t gotten the message. Every so often, directors still try to turn at-home entertainment into an in-theater event. Problem is, they’re different things meant for different audiences. Film fans love movies that tell them a story. Gamers like to tell the story themselves. Burning […]

Almost anyone is capable of anything, and in noir, they’re always capable of much worse. More of a mood than a genre, film noir is filled with sadistic husbands, femme fatales and poor jerks who always get left holding the bag. There are no happy endings. Sometimes there’s barely an ending at all. The tight, […]

It’s the only sport that matters. Feverish fans of hockey, football, baseball and basketball can argue all they want, of course. But  boxing is fundamentally different. Two warriors enter a ring. One walks out victorious. The other may not walk out at all. It’s stakes like that which give the sport its savage excitement, a […]

Holy Lands isn’t a bad movie. It’s four mediocre movies mixed together. There’s the fish-out-of-water film. There’s the cranky-old-performer/Oscar-bait film. There’s the dysfunctional family film. There’s the lightly literary art film. Except in this case, the total is less than the sum of its parts. Directed and written by Amanda Sthers, adapting her own novel […]

When we first meet the hero of The Outsider, a Chinese railroad worker in the Old West, he’s relaxing in a cozy little tent on the prairie. His wife is beside him, and their home is decorated with tiny, folded paper cranes. And if you’re wondering how he got such a nice place, or managed […]