Michael Nordine

If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China's highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having......

The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director......

Nearly two years after closing for renovations, Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex has returned, like so many other Los Angeles institutions, with a facelift and a new name. Now the Monica Film Center, the art-house chain’s six-screen theater sits poised to lure tourists and locals alike from the nearby Third Street Promenade......

Jane Got a Gun’s reputation precedes it, but it shouldn’t define it. After a tortured production that included the departure of original director Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and a revolving door of leading men, the Western arrives in theaters long after popular opinion declared......

There are worse ways for a television star to transition into film than a horror movie. There are also better movies to do it in than The Boy. Still, Lauren Cohan of The Walking Dead shines bright in William Brent Bell’s dim genre exercise, a vital presence opposite a lifeless......

Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity: the spontaneous “USA! USA!” chant that erupts after an out-of-his-mind Zac Efron announces to spring breakers that he’s just unknowingly smoked crack, or Aubrey Plaza commanding as foreplay that Robert De Niro, as the......

During a job interview last April, Darrell Hodges was asked a familiar canned question: “If you could do anything right now, what would you be doing?” Hodges’ answer was as swift as it was unexpected: “I’d be running a store that sells import Blu-rays.” The position he was applying for......

Acropolis Cinema doesn’t have an address, but it does have a plan. The roving screening series, which launches tonight with the Los Angeles premiere of Raya Martin and Mark Peranson's La última película at the Los Feliz 3, is the brainchild of local film critic Jordan Cronk. Since all that's......

To care about the Oscars is to be continually disappointed. Low-key films unexpectedly attain presumed-frontrunner status by sweeping the critics’ awards, only to fall victim to last-minute surges by unworthy usurpers; sentimental favorites get nominated time and again so that out-of-nowhere upstarts can dash their dreams. Why we keep allowing......