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Danny King

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Hollywood at War: Five Came Back Illuminates the Art and Fate of Great Directors in WWII

By Danny King
Mar 31, 2017

Unpromisingly, Five Came Back, a series that surveys the military service of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler — who cut off their Hollywood careers to serve in the Second World War and were thereafter irrevocably changed both in profession and in life — opens...
Bleed For This: The Latest Underdog Movie Boxer Battles Back Even When You Think Maybe He Shouldn't

By Danny King
Nov 14, 2016

Ben Younger’s workmanlike but nevertheless rousing Bleed for This accomplishes something that’s a tall order for any boxing movie: It makes the inspirational training-montage sequences weird. Those are generally the most requisite and unexciting element of the genre, but Bleed for This freshens them thanks to the strange and disturbing...
Paul Schrader's Dog Eat Dog Never Transcends Pulp Nihilism

By Danny King
Oct 28, 2016

Edward Bunker’s novel Dog Eat Dog (1996) kicks off with a disgusting sequence in which a two-bit criminal named Gerald “Mad Dog” McCain — caught up in a cocaine binge that Bunker describes in beat-by-beat detail across several pages — stabs his girlfriend and her daughter to death in a...
Hulu's Mystery Chance Finds Hugh Laurie as — Yes — an Antihero Doctor

By Danny King
Oct 26, 2016

Between The Night Manager, Veep and now Chance, a new Hulu series adapted from a nasty Kem Nunn novel, Hugh Laurie has had an exceptional year in television. The Hulu program stands out slightly above the rest, considering its resonant dialogue with the Oxford-born Laurie’s most famous role. Like House,...
Eastwood's Sully Continues the Director's Interrogation of American Heroism

By Danny King
Sep 2, 2016

Like American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares. In Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) sits rigidly in the living room, imagining the gunfire, roaring helicopters and wailing bystanders of Fallujah playing out on a turned-off television as his children race through the house. In Sully, Chesley...
Hell or High Water Finds Serenity in Two Brothers' Desperate Bank-Robbing Spree

By Danny King
Aug 10, 2016

Hell or High Water sees a Scottish director making a down-home, West Texas–set movie about cars, guns, brothers, banks and twist-off beers. But this outsider’s perspective is nothing new for David Mackenzie, who has worked with Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche on a Los Angeles romance about a gigolo (2009’s...
Blake Lively and The Shallows Are Well Worth the Dive

By Danny King
Jun 24, 2016

According to IMDb, Jaume Collet-Serra’s over-before-you-know-it The Shallows runs for one hour and 27 minutes — a number that produces a reaction something like when an NBA roster lists a short-looking player at five-foot-nine and you marvel, Really? Nate Robinson is that tall? The shark thriller has only three or...
Le Carré 101: AMC's The Night Manager Is a Spy Saga of Unusual Clarity

By Danny King
Apr 27, 2016

Jonathan Pine, the hero of The Night Manager, might have a syrupy voice and skin tanned to a glowing bronze, but in other respects he’s a classic John le Carré creation. Pine (Tom Hiddleston) makes his living unshowily and in the dark, at a swank hotel, juggling front-desk phone calls,...
The Ten Absolute Worst Journalists in the Movies

By Danny King and Silas Valentino
Jul 15, 2015

Long gone are the days when depictions of reporters in movies were reduced to a fedora with a white “Press” card tucked into the bow. We have Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men and Peter Finch’s epic cry of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take...