movie reviews
Beyond the Hills
Cosmina Stratan
Directed by: Cristian Mungiu
Young nuns cooped up in a monastery. Lustful yearnings. The hint of demonic possession. What seems like the makings of a tawdry horror show becomes a subtle and moving exploration into the sacred and profane. The miracle worker here is Christian Mungiu, the Romanian writer-director who helped put his country’s cinema on the map with 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a firebomb about illegal abortion. Beyond the Hills plays it closer inside, timed to the beat of bruised hearts. ... | More »
Jack the Giant Slayer
Ewan McGregor, Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson
Directed by: Bryan Singer
Sounds tasty. Why not have Jack climb a beanstalk to find a band of ravenous giants ready to bite his dumb head off? And who better than director Bryan Singer (X-Men, X2) to team with his cheeky Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and turn a bedtime story into a dark fantasy meant for nightmares? It could have happened. But it so doesn't. Singer's Jack the Giant Slayer, set for release last summer but lying dormant till now, is no sleeping beauty. It's a bloodles... | More »
Stoker
Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode, Mia Wasikowska
Directed by: Park Chan-wook
If you haven't turned on to the cinematic fever dreams of South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook – I'm obsessed with Oldboy, Thirst and Joint Security Area – Stoker makes a great gateway drug. It's Park's first film in English. But it hasn't slowed him down. Stoker is Park's darkly funny, deliciously depraved riff on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, in which a young girl bonds with her serial-killer uncle. The deft script, by actor Wentworth Miller ... | More »
No
Gael Garcia Bernal
Directed by: Pablo Larrain
What if you could stomp on your stronger, meaner, better-financed opponents with a smart ad campaign? No, I'm not talking about the Oscars. I'm talking about No, a stinging, brutally funny satire of modern politics from Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain that ads up to lesson on how to defeat a despot with a Smile button. Ad exec Rene Saavedra (Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal is stellar) is thrown when his boss Lucho (Alfredo Castro) hands him the unenviable assignment of taking on G... | More »
Safe Haven
Josh Duhamel, Julianne Hough
Directed by: Lasse Hallstrom
How much do I hate this movie? Let me count the ways. I hate the way Hollywood insults audiences by deciding a film version of a Nicholas Sparks bestseller is what audiences need for Valentine's week. I hate the way Sparks-inspired films have gotten exponentially worse since 2004's The Notebook. You want titles? Try Dear John, The Last Song and The Lucky One. I hate that Lasse Hallstrom, the indisputable talent behind My Life As a Dog, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and The ... | More »
A Good Day to Die Hard
Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney
Directed by: John Moore
Ah jeez. I actually wanted this one to be good. Or at least decent. Or at least a reminder of what got us all fired up about the first Die Hard in 1988. But A Good Day To Die Hard, the fifth in a creatively exhausted series, is total crap. Bruce Willis is back as the NYPD's John McClane. But now he's in Russia to free his son, Jack (Jai Courtney), from the clutches of baddies. Call it Die Hard Does 'Taken'. Of course, Sonny Boy (nicely played by Courtney) is a good guy. B... | More »
Beautiful Creatures
Alden Ehrenreich, Alice Englert, Jeremy Irons, Viola Davis, Emma Thompson
Directed by: Richard LaGravenese
It starts sweetly, kind of. Young love blooms between Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), a literati wannabe stuck in small-town, small-minded Gatlin, South Carolina, and Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), a visiting witch. Much is made of the two reading and quoting Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Miller and the street poetry of Charles Bukowski. It's all southern-fried bullshit, of course. The two bond best over pop culture references, such as Lloyd Dobler and his boombox in Say Anything. Ethan has this ... | More »
Side Effects
Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
First the bad news. Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh says Side Effects is the last film he plans to direct (up next, it's all painting, writing, theater and long-form TV). The good news is it's a hell of a thriller, twisty, terrific and packed with surprises you don't see coming. Soderbergh, who handles camera and editing on his films, has a rare gift for taking a familiar genre and filling it with provocations about how we screw up our lives. Just think of sex, lies & videot... | More »
Warm Bodies
Nicholas Hoult
Directed by: Jonathan Levine
There's a problem. By that I mean how can Hollywood make zombies the new vampires? A vamp can be dark, mysterious and romantic (see Twilight). A lurching, hollow-eyed zombie walks around with oozing pustules and rotting flesh (see The Walking Dead). Who wants to hit on that? Warm Bodies solves that problem. Or at least it tries. Nicholas Hoult, the lead zombie, is an extremely appealing actor. Check out Netflix to watch him grow from child (About a Boy) to adult (A Single Man, X-Men: F... | More »
Sound City
Directed by: Dave Grohl
Straight out of a roofraising debut at Sundance 2013 comes Dave Grohl’s exhilarating documentary about what makes life worth living. Hold up. I know Grohl’s film is actually a look at Sound City (1969 - 2011), a studio buried in a corner of Van Nuys, California, as it moves from legend to the analog boneyard. But the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer is up to something more than a nostalgia trip. He wants to celebrate the nondigital sweat that goes into making music... | More »
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