When Robert De Niro appeared as the title character in the dopey gross-out comedy “Dirty Grandpa” early last year, I’d assumed it was a fluke — after all, even living legends need an easy paycheck once in a while. But with his latest role as an aging insult comic in Taylor Hackford’s foul-mouthed, shaggy dog […]
Robert De Niro
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Film Review: “The Intern”
As a director, Nancy Meyers’s style is almost aggressively plain and unobtrusive, yet there’s no mistaking her films for anyone else’s. Known for her attention to detail when it comes to dressing her sets, she makes movies that sometimes feel more like tasteful home decor catalogs than motion pictures, and typically revolve around low-conflict plots […]
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“The Family”
The Mafia penetrates American life so deeply and fully that the organization provides the subject for both gangster films and comedies (mobedies?). Although the mob’s traditional business enterprises — robbery, drugs, prostitution, gambling, extortion, political corruption, etc., etc., usually accompanied by violence and bloodshed — hardly qualify as material for laughs, some writers and filmmakers […]
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A Greek tragedy of a cop flick
As the new Robert De Niro film demonstrates, even so ostensibly simple and relatively ancient a form (at least for the cinema) as the cop flick, even in the blockbuster blossom time, possesses the potential to be more than mysteries, manhunts, and shootouts. Based on a true story, City by the Sea examines not only […]
