by Richard von Busack
SOME WRITERS work from the ending backward, and the newest Woody Allen film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, shows signs of such reverse engineering. The ending neatly matches elderly pessimism …

by Richard von Busack
The Spike and Mike New Generation of Animation (now playing in limited engagements) continues the good work done in recent years. As for the parallel Spike and Mike Sick and Twisted Fest, …

by Richard von Busack
The new Oliver Stone film starts with a critique of capitalism that doesn’t really want to critique capitalism and keeps going. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps unfolds into a good father/bad father/“but …

by Richard von Busack
The new documentary Catfish does for social networking what 1999’s Blair Witch Project did for hand-held film. In Blair, a fictional group of filmmakers was done for by the unseen. Heather and …

by Richard von Busack
Not a movie star, but a man who plays one in the movies, director-actor Ben Affleck is a hunk-sized hole in The Town. The intriguing previews disguise a Dennis Lahane knock-off wounded …

by Richard von Busack
OLIVE (Emma Stone) is a high school student in Ojai, population 8,000; her dirty-minded best friend, Rhiannon (Aly Michalka), invites her over for a party, but Olive declines and fibs about having …

By Richard von Busack
The first and last thing we see in 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai is a flight of vultures. The epic, digitally restored and now playing Sept 10-16 at a long …

By Richard von Busack
Dana Brown is the son of the man I’ve heard described as the only really financially successful independent filmmaker in history, Bruce Brown (Endless Summer, et al). Happily the guava didn’t fall …

by Richard von Busack
THE SLOW-COOKED existential spy movie The American breaks no new philosophical ground. Still, it has the true resonance of the spy movie: that summing up of men’s alienation, fear of betrayal, and …

by Richard von Busack
Cinema is a study of contrasts. Take the face of Danny Trejo, star of Machete. If you don’t have a picture of him, you can easily make a model by acquiring some …