There’s an easy way and a hard to explain Cloud Atlas. The easy way: it simultaneously tells six linked stories taking place over the span of five hundred years. Individually these stories are (generally) easy to understand, and, just as importantly, easy to follow, as they weave in and out of one another. However, to […]
Here’s the thing, I like Pitch Perfect. I’ve seen it twice now and enjoyed it both times, because it’s exactly the movie I’m supposed to like. I mean, university a capella? Hilarious, and also ripe for all sorts of character fun and honest-to-god stories about competition and friendship and belonging (there are people whose job […]
While I’ll be the first to admit that both Casino Royal and its ugly stepsister Quantum of Solace were not what I would consider the crème de la crème of the Bond franchise, I still found both films to be very enjoyable for one simple reason: Daniel Craig does good Bond. With his third swing […]
Before the release of Ben Affleck’s surefire hit Argo, the film garnered a ton of positive press from movie people and really pissed-off chatter from, specifically, grumpy Canadians. The film is a topical period piece in the same way that Charlie Wilson’s War used a story from the 1980s to say something current about the […]
When you walk into any movie based on the infamous comic known as Judge Dredd, most movie goers are well aware that they are not going to see academy award winning material here. What you can expect and get plenty of- and then some- is hard hitting action that takes no prisoners, oodles of blood […]
Here’s the analogy I like more than I should: For a Good Time, Call… has great bones, terrible muscle, and combination skin. The bones of the movie- its premise and its characters, the things that make it stand up and exist at all- are fantastic. The idea- a pair of female roommates start a phone […]
When I walked out of the movie theatre after seeing The Dark Knight Rises, I was conflicted. Certainly, I didn’t hate it. It does all the things a good summer superhero movie should do. It made me want to eat popcorn and fight crime. It’s got great action sequences, punchy dialogue, a sense of the […]
With found footage movies on life support, writer and director David Ayer hopes to reanimate the genre with his first-person buddy cop action film, End of Watch. Having written Training Day, Mr. Ayer certainly had the street credentials for the job, but his flashy and ornate homage to the television show Cops, the original forbearer […]