Meryl Streep can do no wrong. The greatest film actress of all time is right at home portraying a lifetime rock ‘n roller with tattoos, weird hair and serious mommy issues. Streep has proven she can sing before, in several […]
Continue reading »Category: Recent Releases
The End of the Tour (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Intimate character studies such as The End of the Tour may not be particularly cinematic, but they can still be terrifically entertaining. In this case, Jason Segel portrays writer David Foster Wallace in 1996, soon after the publication of his acclaimed […]
Continue reading »Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Wow! The best movie I’ve seen all year is the fifth — yes, the fifth! — entry in a franchise that I have had real problems with since the beginning. Rogue Nation is a blast all the way through, with great […]
Continue reading »Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
Stop-motion animation has been around since the silents of the 1920s, made famous by practitioners such as Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Will Vinton and Nick Park. Park works for Aardman Animation, the company that produced Chicken Run and the Wallace and […]
Continue reading »Irrational Man (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
Woody Allen’s films are considered light entertainment, even when they delve into darker elements of human interaction. The newest example of this is Irrational Man, a comedic drama which follows a troubled philosophy professor to a summer gig at a […]
Continue reading »Ant-Man (2015) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Superheroes come in all shapes and sizes, and now one is the size of an ant. He is Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and he is an ex-con, an industrial cat burglar. Fate, in the form of Dr. Hank Pym (Michael […]
Continue reading »Trainwreck (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
I have never been a big fan of Judd Apatow’s. I find his films to be crude, lewd and rude, without enough dramatic counterbalance. But perhaps I’ve been too rash in my dismissal of Apatow, because Trainwreck is somewhat different for […]
Continue reading »Paper Towns (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
I liked The Fault in Our Stars last year, and I think Paper Towns, based on a book by the same author, is even better. It creates multidimensional, realistic teenage characters of a nerdy bent (they’re in band, get good grades, […]
Continue reading »Southpaw (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
I have come to believe that it is rather difficult to make an uninteresting or non-compelling boxing movie. At the center are two men (or women) in primal form, knocking the snot out of each other, often in slow motion […]
Continue reading »Pixels (2015) ☆ ☆ 1/2
It’s been a while since Adam Sandler actually produced or starred in anything of cinematic value. Pixels actually comes close. It has ambition; it wants to become the Ghostbusters of the arcade video game era. With a stronger script and less rambling […]
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