The recent death of Louis Zamperini, the subject of Unbroken, adds a poignancy to its release that both enhances and undermines Angelina Jolie’s chronicle of his survival. On one hand, Unbroken, based on Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling account of Zamperini’s tremendous […]
Continue reading »Category: Recent Releases
The Theory of Everything (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆
I like to judge movies according to how well I believe they have fulfilled their ambition. Sure, it’s subjective, but what approach isn’t? You can tell that some films are satisfied to entertain, to amuse, to frighten, to tell a […]
Continue reading »St. Vincent (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆
St. Vincent is one strange movie. It centers on a deeply troubled man, Vincent MacKenna (Bill Murray) whose isolated life of drudgery is interrupted by the arrival of new neighbors — and a second chance. The neighbor kid, Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), […]
Continue reading »Big Hero 6 (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
Modern animated films offer unlimited opportunity for imagination to run wild, and when they are really, really well done they often become blockbusters. Big Hero 6 deserves to be a blockbuster; it is a marvelous movie that revels in the […]
Continue reading »Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) ☆ ☆
Anyone who regularly reads my reviews knows that I often bemoan the state of modern film comedy, which so often now wallows in vulgarity and raunchiness instead of actually trying to be legitimately, intelligently funny. Read my review of We’re […]
Continue reading »The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
I was, and continue to be, disturbed by the premise of the first Hunger Games movie (I’ve not read the books) in which teenagers and children are forced to hunt and kill other teenagers and children as a form of futuristic […]
Continue reading »Birdman (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
Perhaps the most revelatory film I’ve seen all year is Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s Birdman, Or, the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance. From the very beginning, this is a virtuoso display of camerawork, editing, acting and directing. It is structured as if […]
Continue reading »Whiplash (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
One of the most acclaimed movies of 2014 (so far) is Whiplash, a drama starring Miles Teller as a first-year student at a music conservatory, whose drumming attracts the notice of the conservatory’s most respected — and feared — instructor, […]
Continue reading »Interstellar (2014) ☆ ☆ 1/2
I confess that I had huge expectations for this movie. Not because director Christopher Nolan is the darling of comic fans for his “Dark Knight” trilogy, but because it seemed to mark a return to hard science-fiction: the prime importance […]
Continue reading »Gone Girl (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Gone Girl is a complex character-driven mystery in which a woman disappears and her husband is eventually arrested for her murder. But in this riveting tale from David Fincher — with a screenplay written by the original author, Gillian Flynn –secrets […]
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