movie reviews

February 2, 2012

Chronicle

Dane DeHaan

Directed by: Josh Trank

Just when I was ready to effing scream if I had to sit through another found-footage chunk of FX out of the Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity playbook, along comes Chronicle to make me a believer. Despite a gimmicky premise, Chronicle fuels its action with characters you can laugh with, understand and even take to heart. Major props to screenwriter Max Landis and director Josh Trank for this mesmerizing mind-bender. Chronicle starts with high school senior Andrew (Dane DeHaan, looking like a y... | More »

The Woman in Black

Daniel Radcliffe

Directed by: Joseph Watkins

Moving onward from Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe acquits himself admirably as Arthur Kipps, a Victorian-era widower and father racked by a grief that may cost him his job as an attorney and earn him the wrath of an evil spirit who may be after Arthur's four-year-old son (Misha Handley). That's the premise of The Woman in Black, a truly haunting and hypnotic ghost story that earns its chills old-school through artful atmospherics and no switching to the torture porn default position... | More »

W.E.

Andrea Riseborough, Abbie Cornish

Directed by: Madonna

Madonna directs again! Oh, no! Oh, yes! A hard lesson should have been learned after Filth and Wisdom, but here's Madge one more time doing something for which she is eminently unsuited – directing. Madonna's tenacity deserves praise, unlike anything else in this torturously torpid costume drama, except the costumes which gleam with period elegance. There is an idea here. Madonna and co-screenwriter Alek Keshishian (director of Madonna: Truth or Dare) are telling the true stor... | More »

January 27, 2012

Man on a Ledge

Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks

Directed by: Asger Leth

Sam Worthington is on a ledge. Is he ready to jump off Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel because he's measuring how far his career has fallen since starring in Avatar? Nah. Nothing that interesting. He's playing an ex-cop who's escaped prison to prove his innocence by showing he’s been framed by a dirty-rat tycoon (Ed Harris, way too good for this crap). While the cop's brother (Jamie Bell) works the case on the ground and a negotiator Elizabeth Banks) tries to talk&n... | More »

One for the Money

Katherine Heigl, Jason O’Mara

Directed by: Julie Anne Robinson

Confession: I enjoy reading mysteries, I devour them, actually. And author Janet Evanovich hit paydirt in 1994 when she invented the character of Stephanie Plum, a hard-ass bounty hunter from Jersey who always gets her man. One for the Money, the first of Evanovich's 18 and counting Plum bestsellers, now hits the screen with a blazingly miscast Katherine Heigl, her blond tresses turned dingy brown. Like that helps! It's an origin story so we see how Plum's caree... | More »

Red Tails

Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Nate Parker

Directed by: Anthony Hemingway

George Lucas has been obsessed for decades with telling the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, African-American aviators who fought with distinction for the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II, despite racial discrimination that often reduced their roles to bomber escorts. It's a hell of a tale, a Star Wars based in historical fact. But executive producer Lucas, in tandem with director Anthony Hemineway (The Wire, Treme), half botches the job. The flying sequences are electric &ndas... | More »

January 26, 2012

The Grey

Liam Neeson

Directed by: Joe Carnahan

Nature is a bitch. As you'll see in The Grey, a terrifically exciting, deeply unsettling survivalist epic about a dirty half-dozen or so whose plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness, leaving them prey to biting cold and teeth-gnashing wolves. Liam Neeson, in top form, heads the cast as Ottway, a sharpshooter hired by an Alaska oil refinery to keep wolves, bears and other creatures away from the riggers. On a trip home after a grueling five-week shift, the men are victims of a storm that... | More »

January 19, 2012

Haywire

Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbende

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

Into the cinematic dead zone of January comes Haywire to kick off the new movie year on a sexy action high. I shouldn't be surprised, since Steven Soderbergh, the Oscar-winning director of Traffic, is the prankster behind the camera. This is Soderbergh working lean and mean outside the mainstream comforts of the Ocean's franchise. Shooting digitally on the 4K Red One camera, Soderbergh gives Haywire B-movie oomph without sacrificing his fluid elegance. Plus, there's no keeping ... | More »

Coriolanus

Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave

Directed by: Ralph Fiennes

As a first-time film director, Ralph Fiennes updates Shakespeare's Coriolanus into a brutal tale of modern warfare (think The Hurt Locker, which shares a cinematographer in Barry Ackroyd) with no damage to the Bard's bruising poetry. Neat trick. Shot in Belgrade, Serbia, the film pits Fiennes' Gen. Caius Martius, a.k.a. Coriolanus, against the marauding Voluscian army, led by Aufidius (Gerard Butler, as comfy with verse as he is in battle). But Coriolanus has a greater enemy: t... | More »

January 13, 2012

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller

Directed by: Lynne Ramsay

Acting doesn't get much better than the subtly brilliant display put on by Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin. On the surface, the film is a bad-seed story, drawn from Lionel Shriver's bestseller about Eva Khatchadourian (Swinton), a travel writer who believes she's been trapped since giving birth to a monster. Her photographer husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), sees little wrong with Kevin (played as a child by Rock Duer and Jasper Newell, and as a teen by Ezra Mill... | More »