MOVIE REVIEWS (1): THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
July 17, 2012 by admin · 7 Comments
Reviews have begun to trickle in for this weekend’s much anticipated The Dark Knight Rises, and some of them are as extravagant in their praise as audiences are expected to be in their spending. In the Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy calls the movie a “blockbuster by any standard. … “[The] Batman trilogy makes everything in […]
MOVIE REVIEWS: TED
June 29, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Raunchy? Yes. Funny? Yes. That’s the way most of the nation’s critics have voted in their reviews of Seth MacFarlane’s Ted. In fact, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times minces no superlative: “The funniest movie character so far this year is a stuffed teddy bear. And the best comedy screenplay so far is Ted,” he […]
MOVIE REVIEWS: BRAVE
June 22, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Pixar’s latest entry, Brave, is not receiving the unanimous praise from critics that the studio’s early entries did, but it is not receiving the slams that Cars 2 did, and the criticism that it does encounter is not particularly brutal. For example, Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal finds it “enjoyable, consistently beautiful, fairly […]
HANEKE’S AMOUR IS NOT THE LOVE OF MOST MOVIES
May 21, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Wouldn’t you know, the current favorite to win the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival this year is arguably the most depressing film that has thus far been screened. And the least Hollywood-like. Amour, Michael Haneke’s film about a woman dying from a series of strokes and the husband who lovingly cares for […]
MOVIE REVIEWS: THE LUCKY ONE
April 20, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
“Sweet but not too syrupy” may not sound like much of a recommendation for The Lucky One, starring Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling. But that is Betsy Sharkey’s description of the movie in the Los Angeles Times, and it is one of the better reviews it has received. (Compare that with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Steven […]
MOVIE REVIEWS: LOCKOUT
April 13, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
The French-made (produced and co-written by Luc Besson) English-language Lockout is arriving without a single positive review from a critic at a major-market newspaper. It is, writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “as dopey an entertainment as imaginable.” However, she allows, “it’s also a reminder that the film’s star, Guy Pearce, has always […]
MOVIE REVIEWS: AMERICAN REUNION
April 6, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Most of the reviews of American Reunion trash the film as if it were a stale, leftover pie, which, in a sense it is. It’s a ten-year follow-up to 1999’s American Pie, 2001’s American Pie 2, and 2003’s American Wedding. And even the less brutal reviews hardly serve as recommendations. Roger Ebert in the Chicago […]
MOVIE REVIEWS: MIRROR MIRROR
March 30, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
The verdict of most critics on Mirror Mirror: fair. No poison apples but plenty of daggers. We take it back — there are a few bad apples. Kyle Smith’s review in the New York Post is utterly lethal (and probably funnier than the movie itself, judging from the other critics’ remarks). “As garish-looking as Versailles […]
MOVIE REVIEWS: WRATH OF THE TITANS
March 30, 2012 by admin · 2 Comments
The reviews for Wrath of the Titans are about as wrathful as those for Clash of the Titans were two years ago. Those negative reviews did not hinder the movie from earning nearly a half-billion dollars in 2010. And there’s a legitimate question about who actually reads reviews of movies like this. The best that […]
MOVIE REVIEWS: THIS MEANS WAR
February 17, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
This Means War is taking a volley of shots from the nation’s leading newspaper film critics, many of whom suggest that it’s simply not worth the price of today’s admissions. With a series of “what if?” questions, Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe provides a summary of the improbable plot, then asks, “What if people […]
