Burnt
The movie poster for Burnt makes it look like Bradley Cooper started his own cooking show or something ... but this is actually a movie? You mean Jamie Oliver isn’t dramatic or funny enough? Guess not, but why would someone watch an actor pretend to cook while television is already saturated with real chefs cooking real good-looking grub? Surely it must be the ultra-innovative plot of a mercurial, foul-mouthed chef seeking redemption after falling out of grace by orchestrating the ultimate comeback — in this case, earning three Michelin stars. Yeah, there’s plenty of culinary eye candy to look at with Master Chef presenter Marcus Wareing as kitchen adviser and menu designer, but the most important question is ... can Cooper actually cook? Turns out, in preparation for the movie, he trained with Claire Smythe, executive chef of London’s Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, which, you guessed it, has three Michelin stars. The man did his homework. Give him a break.
A Walk in the Woods
Seems like there’s a movie based on a book every week. This time it’s author Bill Bryson’s humorous travelogue of the same name, written upon his return to the US after 20 years in the UK. Bryson decides to reconnect with his homeland by taking on the Appalachian Trail with his overweight, recovering alcoholic high school friend Stephen Katz, with whom he had backpacked in Europe in the 1970s. Unfortunately, they aren’t very prepared nor in shape, and the book pokes fun at their woes while educating the reader about the trail. Bryson and Katz were in their 40s when they took the trip, yet the film casts 79-year-old Robert Redford and 74-year-old Nick Nolte as the duo, presumably because out-of-shape geezers are much funnier than out-of-shape middle-aged men. It’ll take quite a bit of mastery to make such a sublime, light-hearted slice-of-life book into feature-film material, and it’ll be interesting see how romcom hitmaker Ken Kwapis handles it.
Straight Outta Compton
City of Compton, City of Compton… guess what this movie is about? Yes, that legendary hip-hop group, NWA. The title refers to the group’s 1988 album, which brought gangsta rap to the public consciousness, though they would have preferred the term “reality rap.” Director Gary Gray launched his career directing videos for NWA member Ice Cube, and is probably best known for the stoners-in-the-hood comedy Friday, also featuring Ice Cube. Speaking of Ice Cube, that’s his son playing him in Straight Outta Compton. The story follows the genesis of the group in the violent streets of Los Angeles and their rise to fame, and also touches on themes of race and police brutality, which are still hot topics in the US almost three decades later. The trailer shows all the traits of an epic biopic and promises fast-paced and energetic entertainment, and while the dialogue may be a little cheesy, the beats are good.
Sicario
Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro star as FBI agents in this Mexican drug thriller, and when you have US agents trying to stop the cartels, as in reality, things get messy and twisted. Evidence: “What’s our objective?” Blunt asks her boss, played by Josh Brolin. “To dramatically overreact,” he replies. Directed by French-Canadian Denis Villeneuve, this seems to be intense stuff as the trailer opens with Blunt’s character raiding a house to find dozens of rotting corpses hidden in the walls. She is then recruited to help nab the “men who are responsible,” but things get murky from the get go as they cross straight into Mexico. Del Toro is the grizzled and cynical silent-type counterpart to Blunt who is in on all the shadiness and will do anything to get the job done. Sicario means “hitman” in Spanish, but this looks like it’s going to be way more complicated than just identifying a target and taking him or her out.
Marshland
Marshland pretty much swept the Goya Awards in February, which basically means that it is by consensus the best Spanish film of last year. Critics say that it’s basically the Spanish version of the acclaimed HBO series True Detective, but there’s nothing wrong with that, as we can very much afford to have more productions of that caliber. Set in the swamps of Andalucia, the film is set in 1980, five years after the death of dictator Francisco Franco, and follows two mismatched homicide detectives with different personalities and political ideologies as they investigate a series of murders of two teenage sisters in a middle-of-nowhere town with its dark secrets. It’s gritty and brooding modern noir like its American counterpart, but feels just a bit more intense and fast paced.
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline. The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo style — without ropes or protective equipment. And Netflix will broadcast it — live. The event’s announcement has drawn both excitement and trepidation, as well as some concerns over the ethical implications of attempting such a high-risk endeavor on live broadcast. Many have questioned Honnold’s desire to continues his free-solo climbs now that he’s a
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is Miami Vice territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or The Town. In The Rip, they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon)
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
Today Taiwanese accept as legitimate government control of many aspects of land use. That legitimacy hides in plain sight the way the system of authoritarian land grabs that favored big firms in the developmentalist era has given way to a government land grab system that favors big developers in the modern democratic era. Articles 142 and 143 of the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution form the basis of that control. They incorporate the thinking of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) in considering the problems of land in China. Article 143 states: “All land within the territory of the Republic of China shall
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