Email Author Nick Pinkerton

2012 Stories by Nick Pinkerton

• Movie Violence Has Never Been Better -- or More Reckless

  published November 29, 2012

  Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and its mere existence might shock many Americans.... More >>

• Anna Karenina, Now With Extra Artifice

  published November 22, 2012

  Joe Wright's dust-blowing new adaptation of Anna Karenina faces a towering mountain of precedent: not only the greatest novel by the man... More >>

• Denzel Washington Sulks, Soars in Flight

  published November 1, 2012

  The yammering about "Oscar gold" and Denzel Washington's potential three-peat will soon reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only... More >>

• Your Past Lives Probably Didn't Love Cloud Atlas Either

  published October 25, 2012

  The trailer for Cloud Atlas, the gargantuan new movie of David Mitchell's 2004 novel that took two Wachowski siblings and Tom... More >>

• In Hotel Transylvania, a Comic Dracula Still Kills

  published September 27, 2012

  Casting a tapered, vase-slender silhouette and speaking in a Transylvanian accent with a touch of Borscht Belt, Hotel Transylvania's... More >>

• Trouble with the Curve: Clint Eastwood's Return Is Decidedly Slow-Pitch

  published September 20, 2012

  After a nationally televised improv exercise that, for better or worse, offered more unvarnished reality than anything else at this year's... More >>

• The Bigger and Better Mousetraps of Paul W.S. Anderson

  published September 6, 2012

  The big movie event of September will be the anticipated latest from a certain filmmaker who signs his films with the surname Anderson and a... More >>

• In Prohibition Drama Lawless, Looks Trump Drama

  published August 30, 2012

  Screening the history of bootlegging in urban America led to the invention of a genre — the gangster film — but moviegoers have... More >>

• The Lurid Pleasure of Killer Joe

  published August 23, 2012

  At one point in Killer Joe, a hideously funny tabloid noir set on the outskirts of Dallas County, Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) is let into... More >>

• Hit & Run: A '70s Car-Chase Flick for the Utne Reader Set

  published August 23, 2012

  Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by faintly Muppety co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running mouths as... More >>

• The Old, Good Total Recall

  published August 9, 2012

  Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and features a three-titted mutant doesn't mean Total Recall isn't... More >>

• Ruby Sparks: Finally, the Fantasy Girlfriend Is Fiction

  published August 2, 2012

  It's one of the most cherished legends of the American indie: A socially retarded ugly duck, despite making no effort to regulate his glaring... More >>

• Red Lights Fails to Inspire Faith

  published August 2, 2012

  Red Lights aspires to be a genre movie of ideas. Like a great number of films dealing with supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena,... More >>

• The Dark Knight Rises Is an Awe-Inspiring but Cumbersome Affair

  published July 19, 2012

  Christopher Nolan's ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator's manuals, guiding an audience through... More >>

• Rock of Ages: Corporate Rock Still Sucks

  published June 14, 2012

  Rock of Ages, a new star-clogged pop-musical diversion, is a cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two... More >>

• Prometheus: Impressive Horror with Big Ideas That Don't Always Work

  published June 7, 2012

  Arriving in theaters on the back of a portentous ad campaign, Ridley Scott's Prometheus assumes the air of something more than a summer... More >>

• Snow White and the Huntsman Is a Tale Overtold

  published May 31, 2012

  If ever there was a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it is Snow White... More >>

• Men in Black 3: Go Back in Time (at 2012 Prices)

  published May 24, 2012

  Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB... More >>

• Battleship: Because Every Generation Needs an Armageddon

  published May 17, 2012

  Every once in a while, a movie comes along that's so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg's Battleship,... More >>

• Bernie: Richard Linklater Goes Deep in the Heart of Texas

  published May 17, 2012

  Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals... More >>

• Dark Shadows: Johnny Depp As Vampire Family Man

  published May 10, 2012

  Much of Tim Burton's output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the "Burton treatment" to susceptible texts: Roald... More >>

• God Bless America: Bobcat Goldthwait's Pseudo-Enlightened Death Penalty

  published May 10, 2012

  Frank (Joel Murray) is an outcast. We first meet this divorced, 50-ish, glumly alcoholic white-collar worker — the protagonist of Bobcat... More >>

• The Deep Blue Sea: Lovers Try to Stay Above Water

  published April 26, 2012

  The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about love that... More >>

• The Power of Restraint in the Films of The Deep Blue Sea's Terence Davies

  published April 26, 2012

  With The Deep Blue Sea, the great British director Terence Davies returns to the post-war period — though in a sense, he has never... More >>

• Clinton-Era Nostalgia, Tested in Titanic 3D and American Reunion

  published April 5, 2012

  A historical romance with a then-unheard-of price tag, James Cameron's 1997 Titanic was the nearest thing to a Gone With the... More >>