MOVIE REVIEWS: CONAN THE BARBARIAN

The new Conan the Barbarian is getting the same sort of reviews that Arnold Schwarzenegger did when he … left office as governor of California: pretty awful. “Conan the Barbarian is a brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D,” comments Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: ONE DAY

Critics appear to have a love-hate relationship with One Day. Some love it, others hate it. It’s about an even split. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times admires the movie’s “style, freshness, and witty, bantering dialogue.” A.O. Scott in the New York Times writes that “One Day turns an episodic story into an anthology of [...]

NO REVIEWS FOR SPY KIDS 4

Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World was not screened for U.S. critics. It was screened for British critics, however, and their unanimously negative reviews may explain why it was not for their American cousins. Typical is the one appearing in the London Daily Telegraph, which begins: “Robert Rodriguez’s children’s films [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: 30 MINUTES OR LESS

You’ve got to figure that the filmmakers behind 30 Minutes or Less were just asking for it when they came up with that title. Critics have pounced on it with glee (that’s another movie they’ve pounced on; see Glee: The 3D Concert). For example, Ann Horniday in the Washington Post: “Would that 30 Minutes or [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: FINAL DESTINATION 5

Horror movies rarely receive positive reviews, and the fifth Final Destination movie is no exception. (The previous four didn’t fare much better.) Mike Hale refers to a line in the movie in which a character remarks, “It’s just that I’ve seen this before.” Hale calls the line “too depressingly true to be funny.” Likewise Betsy [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: GLEE: THE 3D CONCERT MOVIE

Fans of the TV series will come down hard on movie critics who have come down hard on Glee: The 3D Cconcert Movie. Kyle Smith of the New York Post is prepared for the abuse. Commenting on a line in the movie in which one Glee cast member tells the audience, “Stand up for what [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE HELP

For a film with such a charged subject matter — how African-American maids living in Mississippi during the 1960s viewed their employers — it seems odd that many critics focus their attention not on the plot of The Help but on the performances of the lead actors, in particular Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, who [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

No critic has bestowed a four-star review on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But they have been giving it a lot of three-star ones. In fact, there’s not a negative review among the major newspaper critics. There’s no great cinematic artistry here, no memorable lines, no Oscar-worthy performances, they say, but Manohla Dargis [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE CHANGE-UP

Just as you are likely to have to do a lot of digging to find a negative review for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, you’re going to have to do the same to find a positive one for The Change-Up. It’s another one of those movies in which one character gets locked into [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE SMURFS

The Smurfs is receiving little of the admiration that critics bestowed on that other movie with characters who were blue and in 3D. But here and there it is picking up some mostly favorable reviews. Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times observes that the funniest moments in the movie “are either raunchy or scandalous,” [...]

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