Don’t let the accompanying credits fool you. Monty Python alum John Cleese may be listed as a co-writer for this prehistoric coming-of-age kiddie cartoon, but any Fawlty Towers-level of wit or humor has long since been sieved out by Dreamworks and its desire to create another cash cow animated franchise. As a result, The Croods […]
Olympus Has Fallen
Steeped in the kind of flag-waving jingoism we expect from someone like Peter Berg and destined to be a hit despite its gaping plot holes, Olympus Has Fallen proves that there is nothing more potent in the action film genre than a clever, workaday hero taking on a villain with more than mere evil on […]
The Sapphires
War-torn Vietnam, circa 1968, sounds like an offbeat location for a sassy, uplifting musical comedy. But then again, almost everything about Wayne Blair’s The Sapphires would qualify as “offbeat,” which is part of the crowd-pleaser’s numerous charms. Based on true events (which also inspired a stage production back in 2004), The Sapphires starts in rural […]
Reality (2013)
The Italy of Matteo Garrone’s Reality signifies the moral bankruptcy and delirium of Silvio Berlusconi’s government-as-game-show regime in a way that is both bitterly comical and frustrating in its shortsightedness. Seen through the eyes of fish-market owner and low-tier swindler Luciano (Aniello Arena), Naples, once the classical setting of such tremendous works as Vittorio De […]
Love and Honor
Graciously gathering the last three or four decades of the most impersonal and forgettable Vietnam films into one wet beer-belch of counter-culture signifiers and don’t-tread-on-me rhetoric, Danny Mooney’s Love and Honor is clearly the product of a group of filmmakers who are utterly disinterested with war. Tomcat Pvt. Mickey Wright (Liam Hemsworth) and his high-strung […]
Admission
Modern rom-coms and Ivy League schools actually have a lot in common. They’re both vestigial organs from a bygone age when men were Wiffenpoofs and women married typewriter salesmen after high school (or else mooned over their English professors at Sarah Lawrence). They’re also mutually indistinguishable from one another, even while they remain convinced of their perfect singularness with a certitude […]
Oz the Great and Powerful
Sam Raimi’s big and splashy but tin-eared prequel Oz the Great and Powerful turns the spirit of the 1937 The Wizard of Oz inside out. Oz is no longer the place where misguided Earth youths like Dorothy can discover how special home really is. This time, Oz — with its expensively imagined rainbow- and candy-colored […]
Dark Skies
We horror fans are a fickle bunch. Overload us with hyperactive dread and gallons of blood and we complain about the reliance of splatter. Set up a scenario where suspense plays out in a deliberate, slow burn manner, however, and we complain about the pace. It takes a clever filmmaker to find a way to […]
The Croods (Trailer)
Spring Breakers
It begins with a flurry of hedonistic fireworks. It ends in explosions of a different kind. Harmony Korine’s borderline brilliant Spring Breakers is less about sex, drugs, and the drunken idiocy of vacationing college kids and more about the lure of such escape, the reasons young people flock to places like Daytona and St. Pete […]
Stoker
It’d probably be impossible to produce a suspenseful, sensual coming-of-age thriller about the relationship forged between an impressionable, inquisitive teenage girl and her mysterious Uncle Charlie without blatantly calling to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful, somehow-underrated Shadow of a Doubt. So instead of dodging the comparisons, South Korean director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Vengeance Trilogy) embraces […]
Gangster Squad
An unconvincing facsimile of a crime drama, Gangster Squad, in the end, is merely a podunk action movie in a nice suit. Gangster Squad concerns a group of cops led by John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) who are forced to confront organized crime kingpin Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), vigilante-style, on account of their police department’s corruption. The […]
The Call
I know you, reader. I know how you feel about things. You’ve often said to yourself “You know, I really want to like The Silence of the Lambs, but I just wish that the serial killer’s motive made no sense, that the smart procedural aspect was replaced by a series of increasingly improbable coincidences, and […]
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
I’m going to make you a promise: this review will be magic-trick-pun free and now, having read that, you can read the rest in peace. Brass tacks: despite its flaws, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is funny, and if you’re a comedy fan you should see it. It’s performers are in top form, Jim Carrey plays […]
Zero Dark Thirty
The hunt for Osama Bin Laden was about more than payback for 9/11. It was qualified vindication for a superpower that seemed significantly less so in light of said overt terrorism. The scope of the World Trade Center attacks warranted a seminal search and destroy, and over the course of the next ten years, two […]
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The odd thing about the saying “too much of a good thing” is that it acknowledges the fact that, something, in general, is composed of an overabundance of excellence. There’s no qualifier, no additional phrase which augments the sentiment like “…and too much that’s terrible.” The maxim is meant to argue for a surplus, and […]
Side Effects
When he decided to announce his “retirement” from moviemaking (though, as time passes, said declaration appears to be more and more specious), Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh mentioned that he might like to try “new things,” to expand his creative horizons before hanging his auteur hat up for good. In light of his comments, his supposed […]
Repo Man
The scuzz-punk doom comedy of Alex Cox’s 1984 underground touchstone makes for a creepy visitation from a fracturing society. Released at the midpoint of the Reagan era’s celebration of suburban consumerism, it had a gutter-level view of Los Angeles’ bleached-out sprawl and social entropy. Its characters tend toward the feral: repo men who hunt the […]