Reviews
Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 » [29]
B+ |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Star Trek Into Darkness outdoes its predecessor in most respects, except creative ambition.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
It’s a potentially promising setup for a slam-bang finale to what has been, despite its flaws, one of the brightest and most entertaining franchises around. Unfortunately, the slapdash plot is pretty much a disaster. A string of miscalculations hamper the fun. And a late revelation, when you stop and think about it, undermines most of the preceding drama.
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C |
** |
+1-1|
Kids & Up*
Oz the Great and Powerful is brightly colorful, sincere and meant for children. That doesn’t make it good, exactly, but at least it’s basically the right
kind of movie, which is saying something these days, alas.
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A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up
Here is a film that will break your heart, fill it with hope and challenge you to say Yes to God and to your neighbor, all at once.
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B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Jan Struther, who created Mrs. Miniver for a series of newspaper columns later published in book form, was also the author of a number of Anglican hymns, including “Lord of All Hopefulness” (a staple in our family’s evening devotions). That biographical detail puts an interesting light on the religious elements in William Wyler’s Oscar-winning adaptation,
Mrs. Miniver.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Grand Hotel was the first film in history to fully realize the power of the Hollywood star system — the first all-star ensemble Hollywood film.
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B- |
**½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
There is an early moment in
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey that captures the evocative poetry of Tolkien’s songs — something that
The Lord of the Rings films, for all their achievements, never did. By the time the credits roll, that moment feels like it belonged in a very different film.
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A |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up*
Steven Spielberg’s masterful
Lincoln might more accurately have been called
The 13th Amendment — and while the choice of the more marketable title is easy to understand, the more crucial decision to limit the scope of the film to the last few months of Lincoln’s life, and to focus less on Lincoln himself than on the political machinations of bringing about his most enduring legal legacy, must have been harder to make.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up*
The fact-based premise is almost enough to sell
Argo by itself.
Argo opens and closes as a tense political spy caper, but it’s also an affectionate send-up of the movie-making process. The old advice to writers to “write what you know” is applicable to movies about movies, from
Singin’ in the Rain to
The Artist, and few subjects inspire Hollywood — or appeal to movie fans and film critics — more reliably than Hollywood itself.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
(New review for 3-D rerelease) Andrew Stanton’s
Finding Nemo is the best father-son story in all of Hollywood animation, and maybe animation generally. It’s also a stunningly gorgeous film that exploits the potential of computer animation like no film before it and few films after it.
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B- |
*** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Why does stop-motion animation work so well as a medium for the macabre, from
The Nightmare Before Christmas to
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride to
Coraline?
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A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
(Reviewed by Sarah E. Greydanus) Even at their most stunningly far-fetched, Ghibli films also have a history of celebrating the details of everyday life: cooking, cleaning, planting, studying, mending, become important and precious functions, worthy of devoted attention …
Whisper of the Heart may represent the studio’s simplest gesture of this honoring of everyday life.
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B+ |
***½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
The Dark Knight Rises is very nearly the thunderous finale that Christopher Nolan’s unprecedented super-hero trilogy needed after the pitch-black nihilism that Heath Ledger’s Joker brought to
The Dark Knight … Yet something crucial is missing — a major omission that lingers over the whole trilogy, a question raised ever more insistently in all three films, and at best left unanswered, if not answered negatively.
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C |
** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Ice Age: Continental Drift is more like a Happy Meal than a movie. It’s another serving of exactly the same product that millions of families have been served before and will come back to again and again. Its brand-name familiarity and reassuring sameness are its stock in trade. Nothing is different except for the toys; last time it was dinosaurs, this time it’s pirates. It’s more resolutely like the three previous
Ice Age movies than they are like themselves.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
For all that, the new film bungles
who Spider-Man is, where he’s coming from. This isn’t the only problem (there are notable issues around the plot and the interpretation of Spider-Man’s reptilian foe, the Lizard), but for me it’s the most intractable, because it undermines the hero’s
moral center.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Among Hollywood animated films, it may be the most positive affirmation of family since
The Incredibles and the best fairy tale since
Beauty and the Beast.
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C- |
** |
-1|
Kids & Up
I blame the penguins for
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.
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D |
** |
-3|
Adults*
I don’t mind that
Prometheus raises big questions without ultimately answering them. Unanswered questions are part of life, and there’s no reason you can’t have them in art. I do mind that
Prometheus raises big questions and has virtually nothing interesting, insightful or thoughtful to say about them. If the questions aren’t interesting in this film, why should anyone care whether they’re answered in another one?
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C+ |
**½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
The film transposes its story from the register of fairy tale to that of epic myth — but it’s trying for unironic epic myth, iconic good vs. iconic evil. Iconic evil: check. Iconic goodness: There’s the rub.
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B+ |
*** |
+3-1|
Teens & Up*
For Greater Glory tells a story of religious freedom and oppression that is far too little known, and that would be important and worthwhile at any time, but is strikingly apropos in our cultural moment.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is widely celebrated as a beginning, the first feature-length animated film in Hollywood history. It’s just as correct, though, and perhaps more illuminating, to hail it as a culimination — as the crowning achievement of years of experimentation, discovery, growth and achievement by Disney’s animation team.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
It’s all acceptably diverting, and not actively unpleasant like the 2002 sequel. There are no grand twists or revelations comparable to the truth about the “galaxy” in the original. What the film could most use, I think, is a wide-eyed uninitiate like Linda Fiorentino in the original or Rosario Dawson in the sequel — but one from 1969, which would offer a fresh twist on the outsider’s experience of the MIB’s nutty world.
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D+ |
** |
-2|
Adults
If you are in love with the 1970s and Johnny Depp, perhaps you will enjoy this. Andrew O’Hehir says he knew he would love the film when he spotted a banana-seat Schwinn bicycle leaning against the front porch of Collinwood in an early scene. All right. But then comes a “happening” featuring Alice Cooper as himself (!), with a disco ball and cage dancers. At Collinwood. Is this really anyone’s idea of a good time?
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A |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
If
The Avengers isn’t necessarily the
best superhero movie ever made, it is unquestionably the
most superhero movie ever made — and, in that capacity, it is more than well-made enough to take comic-book entertainment to unprecedented levels.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
An Aardman film is always an exercise in absurdity, but
The Pirates, directed by Peter Lord (
Chicken Run) and Jeff Newitt, is possibly their silliest ever. This is the kind of film in which people say things like “Blood Island! So called because …it is the exact shape of some blood!” And: “You can’t always say
Arrrrr! at the end of a sentence and think that makes everything all right.” And: “London town: the most romantic city in the world.” (Followed by: “London smells like Grandma!”) Those crazy Brits!
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B |
*** |
+2-1|
Kids & Up
Disneynature’s
Chimpanzee has the makings of a great nature documentary. It takes us places other films haven’t and shows us sights we haven’t seen on any screen. Visually, it’s a triumph of intripid nature documentary filmmaking, with an extraordinary and heartwarming twist in the lives of a chimpanzee community. Yet like other recent nature flicks, including
Arctic Tale and
African Cats, it’s wrapped in increasingly tiresome, condescending kiddie-movie packaging. It’s like discovering a rare dish prepared by eminent chefs, drizzled with waxy treacle and stuffed in a Happy Meal box.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
In a way it’s like the antithesis of a Dan Brown novel. Brown’s stories peer with feverish, lurid imagination at the inner workings of the Catholic hierarchy, discovering all manner of ridiculous subterfuge, ruthlessness and skulduggery. Moretti’s film hardly peers at all.
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B |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
What’s the last movie you saw that created an imaginary world that was actually beautiful, bursting with color and beauty and inspiration? A world that reminded you of the feeling you had as a child the first time you saw Dorothy open that door on the Technicolor world of Oz? A world you would actually like to enter and walk around in?
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D |
*½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
“Let’s have some fun,” says one god to another, suggesting that they “put on a show.” The moment comes late in
Wrath of the Titans. Very, very late. I don’t remember the response, if any, but “Why start now?” would have been appropriate.
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B- |
**½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
October Baby is at its most thoughtful contemplating Hannah’s unresolved feelings about her biological mother and the tragic way that her life began.
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