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Movie Reviews
Review: Avatar
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a ginormous corporation wants to strip a lush, beautiful (but primitive) environment of all of its natural resources, and the people who live there are none too happy about it. Or this one: a military man finds himself spending time with a beautiful (but primitive) civilization, falls in love with a woman from said civilization and eventually chooses to side with them against his own people. Add those two stories together and stir in quarter of a billion dollars of groundbreaking special effects, and you’ve got James Cameron’s AVATAR.
Review: Toy Story 3
The one overriding triumph and tragedy of being a parent is this: kids grow up. If you do your job as a parent right, you train these amazing bundles of potential to be good, thoughtful, self-sufficient people and you push them out into the world to live their own lives and make their own way and just maybe do the same for their own kids someday. But that beautiful, agonizing process of maturation into adulthood necessarily involves the leaving behind of childish things, a development which tends to be harder on the parents than on the kids — and, Toy Story 3 argues, even harder on the childish things being left behind.
Review: How To Train Your Dragon
I have to confess that How To Train Your Dragon surprised me. I knew almost nothing about the movie going in — I mean, I knew there were dragons, and I supposed someone was going to learn how to train one — but I didn’t know anything about the story or who made the movie or even who did the voices. But I was almost a totally clean receptacle for whatever this flick had to give me. And man, did it give me a lot.
Review: District 9
Twenty-some-odd years ago, an alien spaceship parked itself over Johannesburg, South Africa, presumably because the alien intelligence knew that was the single best place to go if it wanted to make itself into a heavy-handed metaphor for apartheid.
Review: Hancock
Dear Will Smith: You’re a naturally likable guy. That’s why you’re one of the biggest movie stars in the world — because people like you. So why in the world would you want to appear in a movie in which you’re so not likable — especially in a disaster like HANCOCK?
Review: Gone Baby Gone
It’s easy enough to mock Ben Affleck after the downward trajectory into ridiculousness his career took, especially between 2002 and 2005 when he was conceptually inseparable from Jennifer Lopez and made a tremendous number of terrible, terrible movies. But I’m not going to mock him now: his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone (for which he [...]
Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The darkness that began seeping into the Harry Potter series of films with HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN continues to progressively deepen: never has the sense of menace felt as strong as it does in HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. The ancient halls of Hogwarts have never seemed so confining or so dangerous.
Review: The Nines
A troubled actor under house arrest for arson. A television writer juggling both creative and political concerns trying to get his show on the air. A video game designer trying to find help for his stranded wife and daughter. What do these three men have in common? Well, they’re all played by Ryan Reynolds, for one thing, but the nature of their connections is the mystery at the heart of John August’s thought-provoking but maddening THE NINES.
Review: While You Were Sleeping
There’s a good reason Sandra Bullock took the title of “Queen of the Romantic Comedy” away from Meg Ryan in the middle of the 1990s. Bullock projects a naturally awkward adorableness which makes the audience feel very protective of her: we empathize with her romantic plight and we want her to succeed because she obviously deserves the attention she’s so desperately craving.
Review: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Shane Black, who wrote and directed the neo-noir comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, loves to throw together characters who really shouldn’t become friends but do exactly that — usually in spite of their better instincts. Take two characters with very little in common, stick them in circumstances which continue to throw them together when they’d rather be apart, and watch the fireworks pop and burgeoning bromance grow.
Review: I Love You, Man
More than once I’ve casually known — or even just known of — people (friends of friends, usually) who have made me think “That’s someone I need to be friends with.” Usually it’s a realization that we have similar interests, sometimes it’s a touch of envy because that person is already doing something I want [...]
Review: Blade Runner: The Final Cut
Released twenty-five years and five versions after the original theatrical run, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut still feels almost incomplete to me somehow, as if it’s still missing something essential — but is that simply me imposing my knowledge of the filmmaker and the number of times he’s tweaked the film onto it?
Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gives its audience many, many bits and pieces of information which never connect, never quite come together into anything resembling a cohesive whole; in fact, the entire notion of causation seems to be almost entirely absent from the movie. Things happen, to be sure, but not for any reason. [...]
Review: Up
I read a discussion of Up recently — I don’t remember where — which said that the movie was ultimately about acceptance of death, which is an awfully adult theme to find in a kids’ film. (Truth be told, of course: Pixar movies are family movies, not kids’ movies, and there’s a big difference.) I [...]
Review: Star Trek
Now this is what I want out of a summer blockbuster. Star Trek delivered all of the action, all of the spectacle, all of the emotion, all of the characterization I could have asked for and then some. [1] I found myself immersed in the world, in the stunning visual design and the engaging characters, [...]
Review: The Dark Knight
If Batman Begins represented a step or several forward from the superhero movies that came before, so does The Dark Knight represent another leap. The Dark Knight retains all that I loved about its predecessor – note-perfect acting[1], solid writing, gorgeous cinematography and art direction – and adds several new flavors to its casserole of [...]
Review: WALL-E
For all of the usual Pixar brand of amazing technical virtuosity on display in WALL-E (and believe me, there’s plenty of it), it’s the wonderful characterization which makes the movie such a joy to watch. That director Andrew Stanton and his wizards at Pixar were able to draw such well-developed characters with such little dialogue [...]
Review: Superman Returns
There’s a scene early on in Superman Returns which beautifully establishes director Bryan Singer‘s priorities for his latest superhero epic: the Kryptonian rocket which Superman has apparently been using during his mysterious time off Earth crashes in a cornfield near his mother’s farm in Kansas. We don’t see the ship land, however, not directly; we [...]
Review: X-Men: The Last Stand
Let’s say for just a minute that you’re not just like everyone else. There’s something about you, either something with your body, your heart or your head, that sets you apart from what society likes to define as “normal.” Maybe you hate whatever it is that makes you different; maybe you adore it; maybe you’ve [...]
Review: The DaVinci Code
Ron Howard’s good with actors. That’s obvious both from the quality of the actors who have appeared in the movies he’s directed and the quality of the performances he gets out of them. The thing is, though, The DaVinci Code really shouldn’t have been a movie about the actors or the characters — it’s a [...]
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