MOVIE REVIEWS: CHRONICLE

There will be something other than the Super Bowl that will be super this weekend. A movie about three dorky Seattle teenagers — the sort who would never be seen dead in front of a TV set on Super Sunday — who are suddenly gifted with super powers. Chronicle begins when they discover a crystalline [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE WOMAN IN BLACK

The reviews for Daniel Radcliffe’s first post-Harry Potter film are decidedly mixed. The Woman in Black is a period piece, a ghost story and a stage for Radcliffe to prove that he can transform himself into a far different character than Harry. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times suggests that he has only partially [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: MAN ON A LEDGE

Virtually all the critics are avoiding using the term “gripping” to describe Man on a Ledge, the drama starring Sam Worthington in which for most of the film he is seen perched on a 14-inch ledge on the 21st floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. The reason, it would seem, has less to [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE GREY

Box-office forecasters are predicting that The Grey, starring Liam Neeson, will become this weekend’s box office champ. Kyle Smith in the New York Post is not so sure. “It may be too conventional for the art-house crowd, yet too arty for the megaplex. I prefer to call it an unusually reflective blood-and-guts saga,” he writes. [...]

SPIKE LEE: WHY HE FINANCED HIS LATEST MOVIE

When Spike Lee was asked following the screening of his movie Red Hook Summer at the Sundance film festival what he would have done differently if he had had access to a big Hollywood budget, he launched into a high-decibel, expletive-laced rant at studio executives that left those in his audience somewhat shell-shocked. The question [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: RED TAILS

If, as George Lucas has announced, Red Tails, his take on the all-black Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, turns out to be his last Hollywood movie, he’s going out in a blaze of critical indifference. Wesley Morris, one of the few black film critics for a major publication, concludes his review in the Boston [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: HAYWIRE

Critics have by and large concluded that Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire has put a new wrinkle on the action flick, thanks mainly to the performance of Gina Carano. “Watching Carano kick, spin, flip, choke, crack and crush the fiercest of foes … is thoroughly entertaining, highly amusing and frankly somewhat awe-inspiring,” Betsy Sharkey remarks in the [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: CONTRABAND

Critics are divided almost equally over the merits of Contraband, the new thriller starring Mark Wahlburg as a retired smuggler forced to return to his old business. On the one hand, there’s Roger Ebert who dismisses the movie as “this crap” in his review in the Chicago Sun-Times. On the other hand, there’s Joe Morgenstern [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: JOYFUL NOISE

Reviews for Joyful Noise are decidedly negative. It is, writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times, “a flimsy movie musical whose parts are pasted together with chewing gum and Scotch tape.” Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times concludes. ‘In trying so awkwardly to include a little something for everyone. Joyful Noise succeeds in finding [...]

MOVIE REVIEWS: WAR HORSE

Most film critics take a cold, analytical approach to what they see on the screen, and if the movie stirs deep emotions, they are likely to ascribe that reaction to “manipulation” by the director. Such is the case with Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, in both positive and negative reviews, as if manipulation were not the [...]

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