[8] Looper is a mash-up of mobster movie and sci-fi time travel flick, but rather than getting caught up in its own clever twists on a (let’s face it) hackneyed sci-fi sub-genre, the movie is wisely more concerned with creating an emotionally gripping story. It moves and builds perfectly, dividing your empathy for its fully-fleshed characters in a story that shuns black and white to …
[8] It’s so refreshing to watch heroes and villains who are over the age of 40. Skyfall repeatedly suggests that sometimes older is better, and I couldn’t agree more. Daniel Craig’s third turn as James Bond is at least as good as his first, Casino Royale. Javier Bardem makes an excellent villain and we also get to enjoy Judi Dench in a full co-starring role …
[5] A womanizer (Patrick Wilson in the title role) loses his testicles right before being slapped with a paternity suit in this soft comedy. Seeing his situation as his last chance at fatherhood, Barry gets to know his baby mama and alleged wackiness ensues. When serendipity plays such a big part in an otherwise character-driven movie, it can be a tough pill to swallow. I …
[6] There’s no director I admire more than Peter Weir (Fearless, Mosquito Coast), even if his latest film left me a tad underwhelmed. The Way Back is about a group of men who escape a Russian labor camp during WWII and risk their lives through thousands of miles of wilderness to find their freedom in neighboring Mongolia. The cast includes Ed Harris and Colin Farrell, …
[5] Working from a stale script that comes too late in the Tarantino wake, this dark, violent ‘who’s conning who’ comedy is made tolerable by its flavor-of-the-week casting. If you like Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride, and Aziz Ansari (like I do), you’ll find it worth your while. If you don’t, you won’t.
[5] A Princeton admissions clerk takes a chance on an ‘alternative school’ kid when she discovers he may be the child she gave up for adoption many years ago. Despite the intrinsic charm of both Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, this movie is neither funny nor romantic, and the stakes are never high enough to keep you from dozing off. The third act, in particular, …
[5] A business man (Paul Rudd) is invited to a clandestine ‘dinner with idiots’ in which he’s encouraged to bring the weirdest, most bizarre guest he can find for the rest of the business partners to gawk. Everyone brings a weirdo, and whoever brings the weirdest person, wins a substantial prize. Rudd manages to find an IRS employee (Steve Carell) who spends all his free …
[4] Queer cinema pioneer Gregg Araki (The Living End, Mysterious Skin) serves up a brightly colored teen sex comedy by way of Twin Peaks with a Dr. Strangelove finale. Like most of Araki’s films, there are nice scenes here and there, and a raw, primal quality to his storytelling that allows him to get away with lack of subtlety better than most filmmakers. But I’d …
[7] An unmanned train is going to crash in a highly populated area unless a conductor and an engineer can stop it. It may be Speed on a train, but as action flicks go, it’s still pretty entertaining. Scenes with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine ‘bonding’ while hurdling toward disaster reek of cliche (so does the subplot involving Pine’s marriage) — but the forced character …
[7] As much as I hate remakes on the whole, this new Evil Dead movie greatly surprised me with how well made it is and how genuinely scary and tense it is. It also avoids contemporary horror pitfalls — the characters aren’t douche bags and there is none of that bullshit monochromatic photography going on, for starters. Maybe the bar is just really low now, …
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