NYC Film Critic

I know that I saw Divergent, the first entry in what’s since been officially tagged as The Divergent Series, a year ago, but I could barely tell you a thing about it 12 months later. Carefully engineered to be the next YA blockbuster, the movie pieced together elements drawn from various other successful movie and book series (including Veronica Roth’s titular trilogy, which served as the base source material) and performed just well enough to merit this sequel, which fills that lull between Oscar season and the earlier-than-ever launch of summer blockbuster insanity. But don’t go in expecting a recap of the previous installment; Insurgent leaps right into the action without much exposition. And since exposition was the one thing that I do recall Divergent had in spades, I wasn’t particularly sad to cut to the chase, such as it is.

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Reviews of a live-action Cinderella and a son’s love letter to his father and the other members of The Wrecking Crew.

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A pair of documentaries are opening in theaters this week that represent two distinct non-fiction narrative forms. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s The Hunting Ground is a journalistic piece that attacks a major news story from a myriad of angles. Liv Corfixen’s My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn is a personal essay that happens to be “written” with a camera. Both films have the individual strengths and weaknesses, but viewed alongside each other, they speak to the wide range of stories that exist to be told in the documentary genre, not to mention the different ways of telling them.

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Peter Jackson attempts to finish his second Middle-earth trilogy in grand style, but the result is minor at best. Plus, a quick review of the Cannes winner, Winter Sleep

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Lynn Shelton’s latest lags behind her other films. Plus, reviews of Force Majeure and the new-to-DVD Million Dollar Arm.

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I don’t remember watching full episodes of The Equalizer during its ’80s heyday, but I do have a dim memory of the ads that played between the shows I actually watched. As I recall, the generally featured lots of gunplay, the occasional explosion and the show’s gray-haired star, Edward Woodward, glowering into the camera. While I can’t accurately say if those “Next time on…” teasers accurately reflected the content of the show, they do more or less sum up what happens in the movie version, which offers two full hours of gunplay, explosions and Denzel Washington (taking over from Woodward) glowering into the camera. In that respect, The Equalizer could be considered an entirely faithful adaptation of its source material…or at least, the advertisements for its source material.

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Liam Neeson takes aim at a brainier kind of action movie in A Walk Among the Tombstones.

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Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon reunite for another magical mystery food tour.

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Quick takes on two smaller movies, now in theaters.

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Grooving on the unique musical stylings of the Swedish punk rock flick, We Are the Best!

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