movie reviews
Django Unchained
Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Welcome to alternative History 101 with Professor Quentin Tarantino. In his last class, cataloged as Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino burned down the damn Third Reich, Hitler included. This time, with Django Unchained, he lines up slave traders so a black man can blow their fool heads off. Fuck the facts. Like Sergio Corbucci, who directed the first Django (starring Franco Nero), in 1966, Tarantino obeys the only commandment that counts in exploitation movies: Anything goes. Who else but Tara... | More »
Amour
Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Louis Trintignant
Directed by: Michael Haneke
The title is french for love. The movie itself, indisputably the year's best foreign-language film and an Oscar front-runner, defines what love is. And it does it the hard way. No sex, drugs or rock & roll. Just two people offering each other total commitment. Did I mention both are in their eighties? Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are retired music teachers living comfortably in Paris, with occasional visits from their daughter (Isabelle Huppert). Then A... | More »
Hyde Park on Hudson
Bill Murray, Laura Linney
Directed by: Roger Michell
The great Bill Murray looks ready to take on the challenge of playing the polio-stricken Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson. He's got the look, the charm, the gravitas and the mischief. But his buoyant performance can't lift the leaden script by playwright Richard Nelson and the mis-direction of Roger Michell (Notting Hill). The movie, set in Hyde Park, New York, at Springwood (the Roosevelt family’s country estate), generates all the excitement of a stifle... | More »
Playing for Keeps
Gerard Butler, Jessica Biel
Directed by: Gabriele Muccino
Gerard Butler adds another career-crushing notch to his career by playing a former soccer star trying to reconnect with his ex-wife (Jessica Biel), and their son (Noah Lomax). So he fills in as his son's soccer coach. It all seems harmless enough until director Gabriele Muccino crassly starts throwing women at him, demeaning the characters and the exploited actresses who play them,including Judy Greer, Uma Thurman Catherine Zeta-Jones. You don’t need to know more. Just stay a... | More »
The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
Edward Burns, Connie Britton
Directed by: Edward Burns
The only good, solid movie to open this weekend is a holiday-themed piece shot through with humor and heartbreak. No bull. And low on sappy. Props to Edward Burns, the writer, director and star, who goes back to this Irish-Catholic roots and the 1995 debut film that put him on the map, The Brothers McMullen. Often called the Irish Woody Allen, Burns knows his way around the business of family. Burns plays Gerry Fitzgerald, the eldest of seven children parented by Josie (a superb Anita G... | More »
Killing Them Softly
Brad Pitt, Ray Liotta
Directed by: Andrew Dominik
Brad Pitt is on a roll – Moneyball, The Tree of Life, Inglourious Basterds, Burn After Reading. He’s a movie star with real acting chops, on full display in Killing Them Softly. Pitt plays Cogan, a hit man brought in to clean up the mess when two idiots, Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), rob a card game run by mobster Markie (Ray Liotta). Cogan is hired to exact gory punishment, which he negotiates with his Mob contact (a wryly funny Richard Jenkins) like a blo... | More »
Life of Pi
Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan
Directed by: Ang Lee
Yann Martel's 2001 book, a bestseller that has since morphed into a passionate global cult, concerns an Indian boy trapped for 227 days at sea in a lifeboat with a starving Bengal tiger. How do you transform the literal and metaphorical sides of the tale into cinema? You call Ang Lee, the Oscar-winning director of Brokeback Mountain, who turns the book into a magnificent and moving film. Lee's use of 3D to tell the story is absolutely thrilling. Like Hugo, from Martin Scorsese, Life... | More »
Rust and Bone
Marion Cotillard
Directed by: Jacques Audiard
Marion Cotillard, who won an Oscar playing Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, is so possessed of talent, allure and exquisite grace that you follow her anywhere. In Rust and Bone, Cotillard plays Stéphanie, who trains orcas at an aquarium on the French Riviera. Stéphanie enjoys a healthy sex life, casually picking up burly boxer Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) at a local club. Everything changes when Stéphanie loses her legs in a work accident, shown in detail later in the movie. ... | More »
Hitchcock
Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson
Directed by: Sacha Gervasi
After HBO's The Girl showed us a corpulent Alfred Hitchcock sexually harassing Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds, I worried that Hitchcock would be another dour study of a dirty old genius. Nope. The master of suspense, played with incomparable style and mischievous wit by Anthony Hopkins in a fat suit, still fantasizes about his cool blondes in Sacha Gervasi's hugely entertaining Hitchcock. But he also manages to have lots of wicked fun directing 1960's Psycho (his biggest... | More »
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson
Directed by: Bill Condon
It's Dead! It's Dead! By which I mean, It's Finished! It's Finished! Five movies have been squeezed out of four Stephenie Meyer Twilight books. All of them redefining cinematic tedium for a new century. And now, It's Over! It's Over! No more Twilight movies EVER! I'm so joyful that I might be overrating The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 by saying it's not half bad. Actually, it's almost completely bad. But there's a smidge of twisted en... | More »
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