261 days ago - If you’re a guy you won’t totally get it. But if you just “get” that you don’t totally get it, you got it. And that should be enough to deliver a devastating blow to the solar plexus.
267 days ago - There’s nothing like a good heist movie— ingenious cons, comeuppance for the greedy and a well-deserved payday for the underdog, who while usually flawed, you just can’t help loving.
267 days ago - The age-old wedding charm calls for “something old, some new, something borrowed, and something blue." For “27 Dresses” the formula brings a mixed blessing.
274 days ago - The comedy “First Sunday” sports a complex and gritty undertone. Nonetheless, much of the poverty and desperation—the serious thread that feeds the hilarity—will be missed by many.
283 days ago - The only conclusion to be drawn from “The Killing of John Lennon,” a fictional re-creation of the title event, is that murderer Mark David Chapman (Jonas Ball) was a mentally unstable nobody who wanted to become a somebody; a goal that by ingenuity or luck (perhaps a bit of both) he accomplished.
291 days ago - This story about a young boy, who raises a sea monster from when it hatches until the all-too-short time when it has reaches the fearsome size of a dragon, has the earmarks of an “E.T.” story.
291 days ago - In a pivotal moment, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) turns away from his only child, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), emotionally abandoning the boy, who deafened by an accident at his father’s oilrig, has now become a burden.
295 days ago - Politics get done, undone, and not done by a process very different than what we imagine. That’s the unambiguous message of "Charlie Wilson’s War," delivered by a brilliantly couched folly that camouflages the grave nature of its end game, enabling us to laugh at what should have us in shock.
295 days ago - “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” is a piece of sophisticated trash—a skillful, well produced comedy that employs racial stereotypes, casual sex, and anatomical display (reconfirming the unsightly nature of male genitalia), all in the service of the story. And what a story.
302 days ago - The much anticipated “I am Legend” will not become one, distinguishing itself neither by excellence nor humiliating failure, but a marked lack of definition. As if intimidated, the work smothers itself with caution and ambivalence, its successes arriving in scattered moments of potency.
302 days ago - “Alvin and the Chipmunks” finds the trio lost and further out of their element than the story of the rodents’ move from the woods would suggest. They’re off course by a half-century, or in other words a lot has changed between Alvin Chipmunk and Snoop Dogg.
309 days ago - There’s a period in pubescence, where the mix of hormones and desire blend into fantasy, often healthy. Improperly entertained, these illusions and the psyches that hold them become fragile and subjected to the weight of reality—even dangerous.
309 days ago - Forget the scuttlebutt concerning the atheist bent of “The Golden Compass.” This whimsical fantasy driven by the standard tug-of-war between good and evil features strong special effects at the service of the story rather than the sake of themselves.