Email Author Nick Pinkerton

2012 Stories by Nick Pinkerton

• The Way We Die Now

  published November 29, 2012

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

• Christ, It's Another Red Dawn

  published November 22, 2012

  America has had its national traumas — its Antietams and Pearl Harbors and 9/11s — but what we haven't faced since the... More >>

• The Play of the Movie of the Book 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... 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 >>

• Cloud Atlas: Your Past Lives Probably Didn't Love It, 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... 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... More >>

• Sinker Ball

  published September 20, 2012

  There is a scene in last year's Moneyball in which Brad Pitt's Billy Beane is confronted by a long conference table of... More >>

• Game Boy

  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 >>

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

  published August 23, 2012

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

• Julie Delpy Brings the Paris Gang Stateside for 2 Days in New York

  published August 23, 2012

  Calling back many of the same characters and more than a few of the same jokes, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy's fourth film as... More >>

• Icy and barren, Alps Is Above All Human

  published August 23, 2012

  In a gymnasium, a clandestine four-person group meets to discuss its name. One member suggests "Alps," explaining: "The mountains of the Alps... 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 >>

• The Lurid Pleasure of Killer Joe

  published August 2, 2012

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

• Self-Important and Overstuffed, The Dark Knight Rises Feels like Batman Forever.

  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 >>

• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: Sucking in the 1800s

  published June 21, 2012

  The logical outer limit of the whole horror-as-metaphor thing, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter shoehorns the entire personal history... More >>

• Rock of Ages Posits Tom Cruise as a Hair-Metal God and Hair-Metal as Something Un-Awful

  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... More >>

• Prometheus: Ridley Scott's Final, Fickle Frontier

  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... More >>

• The Latest Snow White is a Tale Overtold

  published May 31, 2012

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

• Men in Black Goes Back in Time, but You Still Get to Pay the 2012 Price

  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... More >>

• Morgan Spurlock Give Us His Two Bits on Grooming in Mansome

  published May 17, 2012

  "I think that men are having an identity crisis, but they don't really know it." So says "biological anthropologist" Helen Fisher, speaking in... More >>

• Dark Shadows Dusts Off the Ol' Culture-Clash Bit.

  published May 10, 2012

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

• Deep in the Heart of Texas with Richard Linklater's Bernie.

  published May 3, 2012

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

• Lovers Try To Stay Above Water in The Deep Blue Sea

  published April 19, 2012

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

• I Love the '90s: Titanic and American Reunion Bring a Taste of Clinton-Era Nostalgia

  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 >>