Reviews
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D |
** |
-2|
Adults
Meet Pete (Ed Burns). He’s a cameraman who dresses and
behaves in slacker fashion, drinks beer on the job, sleeps around, and
says rude things to Lanie. This means he’s an alright guy who Does Know
How to Have Fun.
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D |
**½ |
+1-3|
Adults*
It’s not hard to play connect-the-dots and pair off likable characters with one another. It’s harder to put them in a story that’s worthwhile. This is a film without conviction, about a town full of people with problems without depth, aided by a guru without soul. Mumford is a fraud. Take that in whatever sense you like.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
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C |
** |
+1-2|
Adults
Neither Gipson nor Banek makes much of a poster child for the danger of civilized behavior devolving into savagery, since neither of them seems quite stable from the outset. Gipson’s a recovering alcoholic with violent tendencies who seems to cause trouble wherever he goes, while Banek’s a soulless shell of a human being too shallow to realize that he’s as unprincipled as everyone else around him, including his wife (Amanda Peet). That unstable human beings can do unpredictable and terrible things isn’t exactly a dramatic revelation; yet even so the film relies so much on contrivance and arbitrary behavior that the events and their consequences seem to have little to do with the human nature of the characters involved.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Besides satirizing
Star Trek’s fan base,
Galaxy Quest also takes aim both at the absurdities of the show itself and also at the behind-the-scenes reality. Most of the obvious
Trek conventions are targeted: the principle that any extraneous character on an away mission always dies; the shipwide crisis that requires crew members to crawl through endless ducts; the isolation of the captain on a hostile planet where he must do hand-to-hand combat with an alien monster.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Adults
This is one feel-good film that earns its goodwill honestly — not glossing over the harder realities and transgressions that afflict family life, but instead making the case that, however exasperating and even dysfunctional one’s family may happen to be, family remains very close to the center of things. Not just "family" in the abstract, either, or as an ideal, but the reality of family as we actually experience it.
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A- |
***½ |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
John Nash goes through life making connections, but not with other people. He sees meaningful patterns where the rest of us see only unintelligible randomness. Ideas are as real as people to him. Maybe more so. Eventually the ideas become
too real — or the people not real enough — and Nash withdraws inexorably into the tangles of his own incandescent mind.
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F |
**½ |
-3|
The film’s central conceit is that the process of colorization
is spread through acts of exploration or self-discovery by which
people step outside their customary ways into a new world. In the
black-and-white world of the 1950s TV sitcom, one common means of
transformation is sexual activity, which didn’t exist in
"Pleasantville" until the teenagers (Jennifer in particular)
introduced it. When Jennifer gently explains the facts of life to
her sitcom mother (Joan Allen), the latter is certain that her
prosaic husband (William H. Macy) could never be induced to
engage in such activity; so Jennifer proceeds to coach her mother
(offscreen) on how to commit self-abuse. The mother then proceeds
to do so, with such explosive results that by a kind of
sympathetic magic the tree in the front yard bursts into
flame.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
The Wizard of Oz is one of a very few
shared experiences that unite Americans as a culture, transcending barriers of age, locale, politics, religion, and so on. We all see it when we are young, and it leaves an indelible mark on our imaginations. We can hardly imagine not knowing it. It ranks among our earliest and most defining experiences of wonder and of fear, of fairy-tale joys and terrors, of the lure of the exotic and the comfort of home.
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C- |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Women are from Venus; men are from the gutter.
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B |
** |
+3|
Teens & Up
Like its heroine Jamie,
A Walk to Remember is pious, wholesome, and eminently open to mockery and derision. Also like its heroine, it doesn’t care what people think of it.
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C+ |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Such “hope” as Shyamalan has to offer is less
persuasive and less memorable than the fears and horrors he
conjures; the overall impression created by his film is an
ultimately dehumanizing, depressing one.
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C- |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
Washington’s knockout performance is the main reason to see
Training Day. It may also be the crux of the film’s moral difficulty.
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C+ |
*** |
-2|
Adults
Tortilla Soup isn’t the delicacy that Eat Drink Man
Woman was, nor does it compare with the exquisite meals
prepared by the patriarchs of either film. But on the level of
comfort food this remake is enjoyable enough, unless of course
you’re a purist conoisseur like Martin. Watching it, I laughed
out loud any number of times, and so did others in the
theater.
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D |
* |
+0|
Teens & Up
The Time Machine is so sloppy that it makes
Kate and Leopold look like
Back to the Future. It’s also pitiful entertainment, succeeding neither as spectacle, as action-adventure, or as love story.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Thirteen Days is about how a few imperfect men more or
less saved the world. Whatever else Kennedy and these other men
may or may not have done, this was perhaps their finest hour, and
the world owes them a debt of gratitude. If the threat of
Mutually Assured Destruction seems remote and antiquated today,
it is at least partly because of the events dramatized in this
film.
Thirteen Days is a fitting dramatic tribute to the
deadly brinksmanship that pulled us back from the edge during the
most volatile two weeks of the Cold War.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Kids & Up
We hear a few anecdotes about Alvin’s life, but nothing meant to make us say, "Aha — so
that’s why…" The only "explanation" comes in the very last moments of the film, when we finally see for ourselves the point of Alvin’s determination to make the journey his own way; why he couldn’t accept a kind stranger’s offer to drive him the rest of the way.
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B- |
*** |
-2|
Adults
“It’s kind of difficult to explain,” CIA operative
Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) hedges with a wry smile. It may be the
most straightforward piece of information anyone gets from him in the
entire film.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Overblown, overwrought, and overdone,
Armageddon was a movie on overdrive, fueled by adrenaline and testosterone, lurching along in fits and starts. Eastwood’s film exudes easy charm and never takes itself too seriously; it runs on a slower-burning but higher-grade fuel: the likability and established audience goodwill of the four aging leads (Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner). Where
Armageddon merely strutted,
Cowboys swaggers. What’s the difference? Style.
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A+ |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Celebrating its 60th anniversary in style,
Singin’ in the Rain comes to Blu-ray with an astoundingly good-looking new transfer of the best available film elements.
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A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
By the time the credits
roll, we’ve had a whirlwind tour of virtually everything you can
do in a Western. There are shootouts, standoffs, ambushes, jail breaks, posse
pursuits, wagon convoys, saloon gunfights, outlaw hideouts,
family feuds, wounded heroes, bucket-line firefighting, a cattle
stampede, and much more.
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A- |
***½ |
+3-2|
Teens & Up
Anthony Hopkins plays “Jack” as a somewhat abstracted ivory-tower
academic rather than the robust and jovial figure he actually was. But
Lewis’ penetrating intellect and faith are here, as is his love for Joy
(Winger), and the crippling grief that came afterwards. A challenging
and inspiring film.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Adults*
Steven Spielberg’s harrowing WWII drama opens with a horrifying recreation of the D-Day invasion of Normandy Beach that has been called the most realistic war sequence ever shot.
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A- |
***½ |
+2-2|
Adults*
Based on Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel,
this is the story of Rob Roy MacGregor (Neeson), head of a
Scottish highland clan who seeks to better the plight of his
people with money borrowed from local nobility, only to have the
money stolen by confederates of the corrupt nobility.
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B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
The pious, folksy Irish and Italian
Catholicism of Carroll O’Connor and his cronies isn’t there for
the sake of either mockery or preachiness, but is simply taken
for granted, just as it might have been in a film of this sort
from fifty years ago, when they still made them. The story also
takes for granted (indeed, depends upon) the fact that the hero
and the heroine manage to fall in love and grow together without
taking their clothes off.
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B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults*
A pity it’s not a brilliant film, only a pretty entertaining
one. If it had been just a bit stronger, it could have offered a
moral counterpart to the acclaimed but cold-hearted Beauty; as it is, it provides an
interesting counterpoint. The Ref has its moments, and
they’re funny moments, but the film’s premise had potential that
was never quite realized. The premise is a peach, though. That,
and crackling performances from the three leads, make The
Ref worth watching — unless of course you don’t care for
black comedy of any sort, or the crass language that can
accompany it.
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C- |
** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
At least there’s stuff worth looking at. First-time film
director Antony Hoffman has an eye for visuals; and the Martian
landscape, shot in an Australian quarry and a Jordanian wadi, is
stark and compelling. Then there’s the constantly swiveling,
gyrating AMEE, a preposterous plot device of a robot which, in
its (or "her") feline grace and unlimited range of free-flowing
motion, resembles a high-tech computer-generated cross between
Transformers and Battle Cats. I liked the little touches almost
as much: the crew uses nifty, collapsible hand-held computers
with a flexible, glossy display that pulls out from and rolls up
into a cylindrical CPU like a window shade, looking for all the
world like something you might actually see in a Macintosh
commercial from 2050, when the movie is set.
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A+ |
**** |
+4|
Kids & Up*
Witness the astonishing
animation of scale at work in capturing the towering monuments of
Egypt, or the host of departing Hebrews: few if any traditional
animated films have ever captured the sheer sense of size
in this film. Watch the subtle storytelling in an early scene as
the infant Moses, caught up in the Queen’s arms, eclipses the
toddler Ramses in her line of vision, leaving him standing there
with outstretched arms; foreshadowing the rivalry and ultimately
the enmity between the heir to the throne and his Hebrew foster
brother. Notice the small details in those quiet numinous
moments: the pebbles rolling back at Moses’ feet at the burning
bush; the halo of clear water around his ankles as the Nile turns
to blood; the horror of an Egyptian servant as the surface of the
water bubbles and the first frogs begin to flop out of the river
onto the palace stairs; an extinguished candle flame or an
offscreen sound of a jar crashing as the destroying angel swirls
in and out among the Egyptians.
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D+ |
*½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Yet whereas Titanic was the work of a master
manipulator, a man with a special genius for making cheesy
melodrama seem moving and gripping, Michael Bay has so far in his
career shown no competence for anything but pyrotechnics.
Cameron’s film shrewdly focused on its three leads (Leonardo
DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Billy Zane), all of whom are gifted
with real charisma and screen presence. Pearl Harbor,
however, is burdened by a sprawling cast of characters, led by
Ben Affleck (another Armageddon alum), who’s as blandly
generic as no-name corn flakes — and doesn’t even compensate by
taking likeable roles. Affleck’s out-acted by relative unknown
Josh Hartnett (Blow Dry), the best friend and romantic
rival (even though Hartnett’s character is equally underwritten);
he’ll be opening movies himself before long.
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B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults*
Two things
The Patriot isn’t are cynical or ironic. It’s corny, yes, and manipulative, not to mention clichéd, sentimental, and platitudinous. But at least it believes in its clichés and sentiments and platitudes. Its convictions may be half-baked, but it has the courage of them.
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