By ANGELA DAWSON Front Row Features HOLLYWOOD—2017 is becoming quite the year for Hong Chau. The daughter of refugees who fled war-torn Vietnam for the U.S. in the late 1970s, is now the female star of two-time Oscar winning filmmaker Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing.” In it, she plays a Vietnamese [...]
By ANGELA DAWSON Front Row Features HOLLYWOOD—It’s been nine years since Matt Damon played spy-on-the-run Jason Bourne in “The Bourne Ultimatum.” Now the Oscar winner (for co-writing “Good Will Hunting”) is back, tearing up the town—actually three towns: Athens, London and Las Vegas—as he attempt [...]
By LYNN BARKER Front Row Features SANTA FE, N.M.—Before it was a very successful film, “The Martian” was a popular novel by Andy Weir, a computer programming techie who first posted the novel on his website, chapter by chapter. The snowball effect from that point can only be described as a modern [...]
By JAMES DAWSON Front Row Features Film Critic Never fully committing either to high-emotion melodrama or the cold equations of a grim techno-thriller, “The Martian” adequately straddles both genres thanks to the likeability of star Matt Damon as an impressively improvising astronaut. [...]
By JAMES DAWSON Front Row Features Film Critic Director Terry Gilliam’s bombastically bizarre “The Zero Theorem” is a mash-up of themes, stylistic touches and character types from many of his past works, but fails to add up to the sum of those parts. Although this extended exist [...]
By JAMES DAWSON Front Row Features Film Critic “The Monuments Men” alternates between a bland bloodlessness that even a couple of cast-member killings can’t make moving and director/co-writer George Clooney’s usual brand of smirking self-satisfaction that trivializes the b [...]