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 […]
Continue reading »Category: Recent Releases
The Iceman (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
New Jersey is full of strange characters, and Richard Kuklinski was one of them. By night a mild-mannered film editor, through circumstance and blind luck by day he became a mafia hit man, allegedly dispatching more than one hundred victims […]
Continue reading »Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) ☆ ☆ 1/2
This second entry in the newly rebooted science-fiction series is a strange entity in that it not only continues the story of the first one (Star Trek, 2009), but also uses (steals?) a plot and character from one of the […]
Continue reading »Iron Man 3 (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
By and large I am not a fan of superhero movies. En masse they are colorful, action-filled entertainments, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But few of them, for me, elevate themselves to something greater. I suppose that is why […]
Continue reading »42 (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Movies involving sports successes are, by their very nature, inspirational. They celebrate whatever it is inside us that arises in competition and makes us perform better, faster, stronger or smarter than other people. Most everyone has dreamed of sports glory […]
Continue reading »The Big Wedding (2013) ☆ ☆
It has become somehow fashionable lately to make all-star comedy-dramas centered around events (New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day) and now that trend has usurped a wedding. The Big Wedding, to be exact. Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Amanda […]
Continue reading »Barbara (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆
One of the cool things about internationally-made movies is that their makers don’t feel the need to have to explain every little thing in them. Hollywood movies too often over-explain, mostly through dialogue, perhaps because the movie-going public is considered […]
Continue reading »Oblivion (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Every once in a while comes a movie that makes me love the format all over again, and suddenly excited to see even more. Such a movie is Oblivion. I’ve loved sci-fi films forever, and am always on the lookout […]
Continue reading »The Croods (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
The animated cave-people comedy The Croods is a fun, enjoyable, visually intriguing movie that was better than I figured it to be. Because of its scope — depicting the very abrupt, incredibly destructive tectonic plate shifts changing the prehistoric world — […]
Continue reading »G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) ☆ 1/2, and G. I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) ☆ ☆
This is my first dual-movie review in this format. I had not seen the first G. I. Joe film, which was made in 2009, because I thought its preview looked ridiculous. But once I decided to see its sequel this week, […]
Continue reading »