Nick Pinkerton

Sara Paxton and Pat Healy go ghostbusting in The Innkeepers.

The Innkeepers Review

Nick Pinkerton
Ti West, the 34-year-old writer-director of The Innkeepers, has spent the past several years steadily toiling his way through the ranks of horror filmmaking. His little-seen apprenticeship cheapies (The Roost, Trigger Man) led to a disowned, freelance gross-out job (Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever) and then finally a name-above-the-title breakthrough......
Haywire

Haywire Review

Nick Pinkerton
Haywire's plot is boilerplate triple-cross, cloak-and-dagger stuff — but the action choreography by director Steven Soderbergh and former MMA fighter Gina Carano puts the impact back into screen violence. After a setup, ex-Marine Mallory Kane (Carano) goes rogue from her job as hired muscle for a private government subcontractor, looking......
Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel

Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel Review

Nick Pinkerton
Bio-doc Corman's World examines the maverick legacy of Roger Corman, who made his reputation, such as it is, beginning in the 1950s as the director of dashed-off gangster movies, horror-comedies, Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and motorcycle pics for American International Pictures. In these films and, beginning in 1970, as budget......
Outrage

Outrage Review

Nick Pinkerton
Takeshi Kitano's latest finds the actor-director returning to the familiar terrain of the yakuza film after recent farces (Achilles and the Tortoise, Glory to the Filmmaker!) dealing with artistic endeavor. Stark and brutal, Outrage is a litany of startlingly violent set pieces filmed in Kitano's decorous, aestheticized style, gunshots blooming......
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Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche Review

Nick Pinkerton
Watching the succession of talking-head testimonials by former disciples of Chogyam Trungpa that comprise Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, it is evident that the Buddhist teacher commanded significant loyalty from his acolytes—though that personal magnetism isn’t visible in the stock film of the guru, who......
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10 Movie Womanizers, From Shame to Shampoo

Nick Pinkerton
The movies are full of bed-hopping men -- think of Humphrey Bogart's serial flirtations in The Big Sleep (1946), and Richard Roundtree laying his way uptown and down in Shaft (1971). But in Steve McQueen's Shame, womanizing is not just an outgrowth of the plot -- it is the plot......

Arthur Christmas Review

Nick Pinkerton
The animated, 3-D Arthur Christmas introduces three generations of St. Nick's family: Weedy retired Grandsanta (voiced by Bill Nighy, hogging the good lines), the obliviously ineffectual Santa Claus (Jim Broadbent), and his two sons, the North Pole's ultra-competent control-room manager and Santa's expected successor, Steve (Hugh Laurie), and his brother,......
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Dog Sweat Review

Nick Pinkerton
Dog Sweat skips among the loosely connected lives of six young Iranians whose desires chafe against the social and fundamentalist political restrictions of the regime. One young woman conducts an affair with a married man, while, skirting the morality police, her friend wanders the city looking for a place to......
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Happy Feet Two Review

Nick Pinkerton
Mumble, the hoofing emperor penguin from the first Happy Feet (voiced again by Elijah Wood), now struggles to make a fatherly impression on his own chick, Erik, who has instead found his role model in a mysterious beaked penguin, Sven (Hank Azaria, doing burlesque Swede), who has become a messianic......
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The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch Review

Nick Pinkerton
The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch is based on a Belgian comic book originally begun in the 1970s. It must be that the film's murky, flashback-lashed narrative of jet-setting corporate backstabbing is easier to follow with some knowledge of the source material, otherwise it's impossible to imagine how anything as convoluted......