| Latest Movie Reviews |
The Grey
Liam Neeson is one of those actors who validates a film by his mere presence in it. Sure enough, he brings gravitas and credibility to this survival thriller set in the snowy wilderness of Alaska. I wish he’d also brought along a better script.
Like today’s other mainstream release, Man on a Ledge, The Grey isn’t a turkey or an embarrassment. It’s a formula-driven movie that takes far t .....read more |
Underworld Awakening
Come On Now
The fanboy-wank-material franchise continues! Kate Beckinsale runs around a dank, rainy, gothy, first-person-shooter generic urban landscape -- in slo-mo! -- in skintight leather! or some sort of pleatheresque rubber at least! -- killing werewolves and never ever combing her hair! Cuz that’s sexy, if you’re a 14-year-old boy. And the blood and brainmatter splatters out at yo .....read more |
Red Tails
The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of African-American fighter pilots who were trained despite the racism entrenched in the U.S. armed services during World War II. They were deployed in action and achieved fame and many decorations for their skills against German pilots, which included engaging and shooting down Messerschmitt Me 262s, the first jet fighters. So successful were they at escorting Ame .....read more |
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Director Stephen Daldry has never met a Big Theme he didn't like: After 2002's The Hours, a lugubrious women's-problem picture touching on AIDS and assisted suicide, he went to Auschwitz with 2008's The Reader. Following two such high-toned literary adaptations with such hefty subject matter, Daldry's logical next stop is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which not only has a serious lit pedigr .....read more |
Haywire
You have got to salute the marketing folks for giving Steven Soderbergh's Haywire such a high octane sounding synopsis that promises plenty of action given a plot that treads on the usual betrayal of an alpha-character who comes back to seek revenge against the handlers. The film isn't anything like what its synopsis had promised, being silent for the most parts and having little spoken segments, .....read more |
The Iron Lady
"Iron Lady" director Phyllida Lloyd does a wise thing in her film, which expanded its theatrical release today to San Francisco at the Presidio, the Kabuki and other area theaters: she starts her story in the present day, with an aged Margaret Thatcher as a figure of antiquity, withered and left behind by a new multicultural, short-attention spanned Britain, one very different from the one she rul .....read more |
Contraband
I'm growing particularly weary of the wife/girlfriend of the hero whose life and children are threatened by vicious bad guys. It must be admitted, however, that in this film, the threatened means of death makes being tied to railroad tracks seem jolly by comparison.
The movie involves the smuggling of a vast quantity of counterfeit $100 bills from Panama City to New Orleans. Although Ch .....read more |
Joyful Noise
When Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah are singing gospel and strutting for God under the good-time direction of Todd Graff (his Camp is one of the best musicals you never saw), Joyful Noise goes down easy. Sadly, Dolly and the Queen are forced to speak dialogue that would choke two Meryl Streeps. Plastic surgery jokes (at Parton's expense) and liposuction gags (aimed at Latifah) have the subtlety of .....read more |
The Devil Inside
The worst movie of this very new year has a good chance to retain the title for all of 2012. Ripping off The Exorcist while adding the "found footage" scam from the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Devil Inside manages not only to scrape the barrel's bottom but to drill a hole in said bottom and funnel deeper into the scum. And yet this bilge took in a whopping $35 million on its opening weekend .....read more |
Margin Call
It may have happened something like this. "Margin Call" depicts the last night of good times on Wall Street, as a deadly certainty travels up the executive ladder at an investment firm: Disastrous speculation in the mortgage markets is leading to the firm's collapse. We can still recall those days in the summer of 2008, during the Obama-McCain campaign, when America seemed awash in prosperity, and .....read more |
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