MOVIE REVIEWS: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

Paranormal Activity 4 accomplishes pretty much what its predecessors did — it makes its audience feel creepy about empty rooms. “There’s virtually nothing new” in the found-footage movie, Claudia Puig remarks in USA Today, a common theme of most of the reviews, although she notes, “Most of the creepy stuff is recorded via a laptop […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA

What do monster movies and Adam Sandler movies have in common? Well, usually it’s that they both get lousy reviews. But Hotel Transylvania isn’t really a monster movie — the animated monsters in it are rather cute — and it’s not really an Adam Sandler movie — although Sandler does provide the voice of Dracula. […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE MASTER

The Master opens tonight in just three theaters in New York and two in Los Angeles. Presumably they’re among the few in the country — perhaps the only ones — that remain capable of projecting 70mm film. While some critics praise director Paul Thomas Anderson’s commitment to the medium of film, others suggest that the […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: PARANORMAN

The animated ParaNorman is generally drawing favorable reviews, but those critics who dislike it do so intensely. Manohla Dargis, the generally tough critic for the New York Times, calls it “beautiful-looking, charmingly heartfelt.” Each scene, she writes, is turned “into an occasion for discovery and sometimes delight.” And Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, who […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE BOURNE LEGACY

OK, let’s get the obvious puns over with without further ado: Critics are about equally divided over whether The Bourne Legacy is a Bourne winner or was Bourne to lose. In the camp of the former is Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times. “Complex, unexpected and dazzling, alternating relentless tension with resonant emotional moments,” […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE CAMPAIGN

Kyle Smith, the politically conservative film critic for the New York Post lets loose a torrent of zingers at The Campaign, starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, concluding with the unkindest jibe of all: “Put it this way,” he writes, “Jimmy Carter was funnier than this movie.” He concludes: “My friends, I’ve seen some terrible […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: HOPE SPRINGS

Hope Springs is as much about a marriage between two masterful acting talents, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, as it is about the unraveling marriage of the principal characters. “The characters aren’t fabulously dimensional, but the actors are,” writes Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. Moreover, he concludes, “it’s gratifying to see a movie […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: DOG DAYS

The expectations for the third installment of the Wimpy Kid franchise aren’t high. But the same could have been said about last year’s sequel, Rodrick Rules, which, to everyone’s surprise turned up at the top of the box office. Like its two predecessors, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days is receiving several decent reviews. […]

MOVIE REVIEWS 2: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

Rex Reed of the New York Observer and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune have joined the exclusive clique of critics who have broken ranks with the overwhelming majority who are heaping praise on The Dark Knight Rises. It is the antonym of praise — scorn? ridicule? outrage? — that Reed heaps on the movie. […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: BRAVE

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 […]

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