Who doesn’t like Sandra Bullock? She’s a sweetie who has made some really charming comedies. Unfortunately, The Heat is not one of them. There are some laughs in this ill-mannered “buddy comedy” which teams tightly-wound FBI agent Bullock with slobby Boston […]
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World War Z (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
Having read Max Brooks’ dramatic “oral history of the zombie war,” the aptly-titled World War Z, it was clear that filmmakers brave enough to tackle the project would be forced (or have the opportunity) to create characters and a narrative […]
Continue reading »Before Midnight (2013) ☆ ☆ 1/2
We first met Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) in 1995, when they first met each other on a train traveling from Budapest to Vienna. The film was Before Sunrise, directed by Richard Linklater, written by Linklater and Kim […]
Continue reading »Man of Steel (2013) ☆ ☆
Warner Bros. has rebooted its Superman franchise — again — and, to its credit, has gone in a different direction. Man of Steel has a visual style and story sensibility all its own, unrelated to either the four Christopher Reeve movies […]
Continue reading »The Purge (2013) ☆ ☆
As ominous and foreboding as one would suspect, The Purge is a suburban vigilante massacre movie wrapped tightly within a clever concept. The concept is that only one night each year, people can do whatever they want, up to and including […]
Continue reading »Monsters University (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
Twelve years ago Pixar released Monsters, Inc., which was an interesting and entertaining divergence from their Toy Story films. I liked Monsters, Inc., though I didn’t love it. Now comes its prequel, which tells how one-eyed Mike Wazowski meets big, furry […]
Continue reading »Fast and Furious 6 (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
When the first film of what became the cornerstone for this series debuted in 2001, I was not impressed. I rated the first film one star and compared it to the Cannonball Run films of the early 1980s, while acknowledging that […]
Continue reading »After Earth (2013) ☆ 1/2
I’ve always enjoyed apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic adventures but After Earth has removed all the fun by staging the apocalypse that has forced mankind to evacuate the Earth some one thousand years before the beginning of the movie. In the weird universe […]
Continue reading »The Great Gatsby (2013) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Baz Luhrmann’s new version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic story — it was previously filmed in 1949 with Alan Ladd and 1974 with Robert Redford — is astonishingly visual, with glorious camera set-ups, color palates, slow-motion sequences and beautiful faces. […]
Continue reading »Mud (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
Storytelling is the essence of moviemaking, and yet many modern movies refuse, avoid or fail to put their running time to that purpose. Summer action movies especially are designed to overwhelm audiences with eye-popping visuals, kinetic movement and stylish posing […]
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