Recent Stories
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax
Agent Orange: Seussian saga The Lorax will win little kids with brightly colored characters but parents shouldn’t expect too much.
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, much like the Happy Feet films before it, has all the subtlety of a hammer to the skull. Yes, environment-friendly themes are important to impart on impressionable young minds, but it’s ...
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Extremely Long, Incredibly Annoying: 9/11 serves as a cheap gimmick in this film take on Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel.
“As with anything,” Thomas tells his nine year-old son Oskar, “if you want to believe, you can find reasons to.” So true, and prophetic. For surely if you want to believe in Extremely Loud and ...
Contraband
Smuggler’s Blues: Contraband has Mark Wahlberg playing family man as he’s dragged back in to a life of crime.
Have you ever had the experience where one small thing takes you out of an otherwise decent movie? Contraband is an average action pic with plausible twists and a fun story. But the villain, played ...
Best Films for 2011
Art house and heavy punches top the list.
2011 was an overall solid year at the movies. It pushed boundaries, made us laugh, asked questions and, at its best, moved us to tears. But let’s start this list of the Top Ten movies ...
The Way
Dead Reckoning: Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen combine for a surprisingly appealing redemption in The Way
Going into the screening of The Way I had only a slight notion of what the film was about. My understanding was that it would be sad, depressing, and would be about the grief a ...
Real Steel
Dead Battery: The robot fight movie Real Steel can’t punch its way out of a cliché bag.
How do you bring emotion to a story about robot boxing? Cheesy father-son drama, for starters. Making the story a shameless Rocky rip-off, for another. No doubt director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) had ...
Moneyball
Pitch Perfect: Brad Pitt, Moneyball win big by moving beyond baseball.
Baseball, it can be said, is no longer a sport for the masses. The games take forever, there’s often not much action, and the prevailing notion that it’s the “American Pastime” is more a vestige ...
Fight of Our Lives
Warrior knocks audiences to emotional places, deserves an Academy Award (or two).
Sports movies are rarely so good that they make me want to stand up and cheer, but Warrior did just that. It also made me cry. This is a powerful, heartbreaking story about two estranged ...
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Shadow Games: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark wins with spooky gloom and solid acting.
The haunted house thriller can sometimes feel like a lost art, especially with advances in visual effects making it easy to conjure spirits out of nowhere. But like Insidious earlier this year, Don’t Be Afraid ...
Crazy, Stupid, Love
A dynamite cast can’t quite rescue Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Kevin Bacon and Marisa Tomei star in Crazy, Stupid, Love. It is unlikely you will find a better assemblage of talent anywhere. But wow, what a mediocre ...
