DVD & Blu-ray
DVD — Latest
At last, a horror film for disaffected Catholic traditionalists embittered against the Church for post-Vatican II changes; who see the Church itself, not just the larger culture, as compromised by modernism, and impeding orthodox clerics from carrying out true spiritual work.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
From the Leonardo-like engineering illustrations of the opening credit sequence to the hauntingly surreal final image on the edge of space, Hayao Miyazaki’s
Laputa, or
Castle in the Sky as it’s been dubbed for English-speaking audiences, displays the filmmaker’s visionary brilliance as a shaper of worlds as compellingly as any film he has made.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Brad Bird’s
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is so preposterously entertaining that it makes watching other recent Hollywood action spectacles feel like work. What in the last few years even compares to it?
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Saving the Titanic, a docudrama airing this month on PBS, sheds light on an untold page from the heroic side of the ledger. Combining traditional documentary with speculative historical dramatization, it highlights the story of the engineering crew, firemen, electricians and stokers who labored below decks to keep power flowing to pumps and lifeboat winches, first hoping to save the ship and then striving to delay the inevitable as long as possible to save as many lives as possible.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
The Secret World of Arrietty just might change the way you look at the world around you — right around you. A wide-eyed sense of discovery and revelation permeates the film, and what it reveals is … the mystery and wonder of an ordinary home.
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DVD — Recent
Contagion may not be everyone’s ideal date movie, but I’m married to an RN who prefers a good medical thriller to a trite chick flick. Suz was impressed with the technical realism of
Contagion. I was impressed too. Here’s my 30-second take.
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B- |
**½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
Coming on the heels of
Fireproof,
Courageous is the fourth film from Sherwood Pictures, and it’s another step forward for the church-based film company … While the film’s church-based roots and the tendency toward didactic, schematic storytelling are still in evidence,
Courageous is their most ambitious and watchable film to date.
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C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Adults
Putting Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in Stetsons is clearly an excellent idea. Both men have faces made for Westerns, rugged and rough-hewn. There is a sense of stoic reserve and working-class grit about them; neither is the sort of man one can only imagine being an actor, or leading a life of privilege.
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Here’s
Dolphin Tale in 30 seconds from my “Reel Faith” co-host David DiCerto.
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C- |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
The upshot is that this new
Footloose is a dumbed-down, sexed-up take on a story that was already risqué and not too bright — one that shies away from the ’84 film’s critique of the church, but is also further from its lingering Christian worldview.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
A haunting, harrowing war movie, an emotionally devastating character study, and an extraordinarily restrained example of
animé or Japanese animation,
Grave of the Fireflies is a unique and unforgettable masterpiece.
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D+ |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
Little ones are “tougher than we think,” a penguin remarks in
Happy Feet Two, and you can tell director George Miller believes it. The animated sequel pulls few punches: It’s overshadowed by more darkness, menace, heartache and anxiety than any talking-animal picture I can think of since, well, Miller’s last family-film sequel, the execrable
Babe: Pig in the City. Neither the classic
Babe nor the original
Happy Feet contained any hint of the darkness of the sequels. Apparently Miller’s strategy is to soften kids up first, then drop the bomb.
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B- |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling 2009 novel,
The Help is largely about the daily humiliations and injustices to which black maids and nannies working in white homes were subject, and the invisibility of these humiliations to their white employers, until, in this fictional account, their stories are told, first in secret and then in public.
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Here’s my 30-second review of
The Ides of March, now on home video (somehow I neglected to post it before, so here it is).
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C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
The life and work of J. Edgar Hoover offers grist for a dozen different movies or more, and Clint Eastwood’s
J. Edgar wants to be all of them at once. It’s the sort of staidly respectable, competently directed biopic that gives a bad name to competently directed biopics, and possibly to respectability.
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B |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Returning screenwriters Jonathan Abel and Glenn Berger recognize that what’s needed is deeper emotions and darker themes as well as more action and higher stakes … At the same time, the movie makes three key mistakes.
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B+ |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults
It’s a nostalgic film about nostalgia — nostalgia for when Paris was Paris, for one thing. Even if you’ve never been to the City of Light, even if phrases like “the Lost Generation” and “la Belle Époque” hold for you none of the magic they do for Allen, the film makes you feel their power for his onscreen alter ego, appealingly played by Owen Wilson. For that matter, even if you aren’t an Allen fan — even if you aren’t convinced Allen was
ever Allen —
Midnight in Paris could almost make you nostalgic for the Allen that fans remember, or seem to.
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B- |
**½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
The movie is full of Catholic iconography that Catholic viewers and fans of Golden Age Hollywood Catholicism will appreciate. Statues of Jesus, Mary and the saints are everywhere. I compared the movie’s Catholic milieu to a Bing Crosby film, but a Crosby film would actually have edgier personalities and more conflict.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Adults
There is a moment in
The Mill & the Cross in which the power of art, in particular sacred art, to capture the eternal in the hugger-mugger of ordinary life — even in the most horrific and seemingly meaningless events — is revealed with stunning clarity. André Bazin, the great Catholic film critic and theorist, wrote about the mission of art to rescue the world from transience and corruption, to capture moments and events in time and space before they slip into the irretrievable past, and so bear witness to the hand of God in creation. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this idea more resoundingly affirmed than in
The Mill & the Cross.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Moneyball is an ugly name for such an exhilarating film. Indeed, it seems a misnomer, though the filmmakers were more or less stuck with it, since Michael Lewis’s explosive 2003 book, on which the film is based, made such an impact on the baseball world that the word has passed into baseball jargon.
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D |
*½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
While the Atwaters’ book is not exactly a classic, it’s beloved by generations of readers — but not by the people who have brought you this big-screen adaptation starring Jim Carrey. The makers of this film do not love
Mr. Popper’s Penguins. At all. It’s hard to believe that this junk was directed by Mark Waters, who presided over the big-screen adaptation of
The Spiderwick Chronicles, a smart, scary adaptation of a children’s book series that honors its source material almost as much as
Mr. Popper’s Penguins doesn’t.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
This is quite deliberately
not a reboot or reimagining or any such thing. Perhaps we can call it a revisiting. Like this summer’s charming
Winnie the Pooh (also from Disney),
The Muppets is a happy throwback, very much of a piece with material that my generation grew up with, eclipsing the lameness of recent direct-to-video efforts. Who would have thought two classic family franchises that have lain fallow for so long would be reborn in the same year?
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B+ |
*** |
+2-2|
Kids & Up*
Banderas’s swashbuckling Puss in Boots first appeared in
Shrek 2, quickly establishing himself as one of the most popular supporting characters in the franchise. Now in a starring role in this spinoff, Puss spins the story in a direction strikingly different from the Shrek films.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up
Real Steel is just plain unpleasant to sit through. So much of the movie is spent amid screaming crowds and abrasive music, often in dark, trashy dives, watching giant robots pound each other into scrap metal. The robot boxing is surprisingly good (Sugar Ray Leonard was a consultant). It’s the humans that are unpleasant.
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C+ |
*** |
-2|
Teens & Up
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a smartly made, effective movie — but what sort of movie is it, exactly?
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C |
*½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
As played by English actor Charlie Cox (
Stardust), Josemaría emerges as a likable, dedicated, virtuous young man much loved by his circle of friends, the first generation of Opus Dei. There are a few evocative scenes, such as the impression that a barefoot friar’s tracks in the snow make on the young Josemaría. Yet despite a line or two about Opus Dei spreading to other countries, there’s little sense of Escrivá himself as a figure of any particular note.
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C |
** |
-2|
Adults
How could anyone in Hollywood have known, as the current batch of movies went into development, that at least three different films about the greed and ruthlessness of the wealthy few and its devastating impact on the masses—the 1% and the 99%—would hit theaters more or less simultaneously in the middle of the Occupy protests?
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F |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Like the title phrase, which is recognizably English and yet obviously wrong,
Dark of the Moon offers just enough vestiges of grammatical intelligibility to be recognizable as a bloated, steroid-inflamed simulacrum of a mindless summer blockbuster action movie. I almost think it would be better, or at least it would hurt less, if it were a bit more incomprehensible, although I’m told that its predecessor,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, actually was, and it didn’t help.
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Here’s my 30-second take on
Twilight – Breaking Dawn: Part 1.
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B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
In
War Horse Spielberg harkens back to an earlier cinematic age, creating something more like a Golden Age Hollywood epic than any film I’ve seen in years, the one other notable example being Baz Luhrmann’s
Australia.
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B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Warrior opens with a rash of Christian iconography and references: a Pittsburgh church adorned with Eastern-style three-bar crosses from which we see Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte) emerge; a rosary dangling from his rearview mirror as he drives home to discover his estranged son Tommy (Tom Hardy) waiting on the stoop of his house; a Bible that Tommy contemplates on Paddy’s table.
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B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
Is there grace for such pilgrims as these? Perhaps, but it may not take the form they seem to be seeking. At the end of the road, some viewers might feel let down at what has not changed for the main characters, but perhaps this is to miss the change that matters most. Emilio has said that the film is “pro-people, pro-life.” So it is, in more ways than one.
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