movie reviews

April 26, 2012

Bernie

Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew McConaughey

Directed by: Richard Linklater

Texas-born Richard Linklater is one of those rare filmmakers whose work never fails to fascinate. Unconvinced? Here's a few titles: Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Waking Life, School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, Fast Food Nation, Me and Orson Welles. Now let's get on with his latest spellbinder. Bernie is based on a true story. It really is. Want just the facts? Here goes: In 1997, in the town of Carthage, Texas, the body of rich, notoriously bitchy widow... | More »

The Five-Year Engagement

Jason Segel, Emily Blunt

Directed by: Nicholas Stoller

IMAO (that's "In My Arrogant Opinion"), actor-writer Jason Segel and director-writer Nicholas Stoller crafted a sublime romantic soufflé in 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall. That dream partnership gets dinged a bit in the frustratingly uneven The Five-Year Engagement, which drags and sags at 124 minutes. Luckily, the movie never runs on sitcom empty. How could it, with a terrific cast, led by Segel as San Francisco sous chef Tom Solomon and the delectable Emil... | More »

Safe

Jason Statham

Directed by: Boaz Yakin

"Luke Wright, the Big Apple's hardest cop – once upon a time." That's the line in the promo for Safe that's meant to get your blood up. Global action icon Jason Statham plays Luke Wright in Safe, so you know this cop is not going down easily. And that's the trouble with Safe: You know where it's going every step of the way. Statham, the British Olympic-diver-turned-actor, knows the testosterone overload his audience wants of him, and he delivers big-time. The th... | More »

The Raven

John Cusack, Alice Eve

Directed by: James McTeigue

There's a promising premise on the boil here. What if Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) spent the last days of his life trying to nab a serial killer who's been using macabre ideas from Poe's short stories to off his victims? The Pit and the Pendulum, anyone? OK, The Raven sounds like a TV series that gets canceled soon after its debut. But it has compensations, chief of which is John Cusack, who plays Poe with just the right blend of romantic longing and tortuous doubt. Director Ja... | More »

April 19, 2012

The Lucky One

Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling

Directed by: Scott Hicks

Consider yourself lucky if this review is the closest you get to the contamination known as The Lucky One. Ever since 2004's The Notebook became the default choice in chick flicks, based solely on the heat generated by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, the weepie-creepy bestsellers of Nicholas Sparks have ignited a plague of Hollywood tearjerkers. The Lucky One is the latest Sparks assault. Is it the worst of the seven screen Sparks so far? Nope. My vote still goes to 2009's The Last... | More »

April 12, 2012

The Cabin in the Woods

Chris Hemsworth, Kristen Connolly, Fran Kranz

Directed by: Drew Goddard

If it's true that you always kill the thing you love, then horror honchos Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard have taken an ax to slasher cinema in The Cabin in the Woods and chopped it up for kindling. With love, mind you, and a potently playful sense of mischief. Cabin is a deliciously devious scare dance that keeps changing the steps until you lose your shit and fall helplessly into its demonic traps. Screenwriters Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Goddard (Cloverfield), in his feature-d... | More »

The Three Stooges

Sean Hayes, Will Sasso and Chris Diamantopoulos

Directed by: Bobby and Peter Farrelly

There's an idea at play in this rampant idiocy, as well as considerable risk. In trying to introduce a new generation to the slapstick art of the Three Stooges, directors and co-writers Bobby and Peter Farrelly do it the hard way. Instead of a standard biopic that might explain how a 1930's vaudeville act called the Three Stooges – brothers Moe and Curly Howard and their friend Larry Fine – made their Hollywood mark with nearly 200 short films that featured the boys sla... | More »

April 5, 2012

Titanic 3D

Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet

Directed by: James Cameron

Forget the fact that James Cameron's 1997 Titanic is second only to Cameron's 2009 Avatar as king of the box-office world (more than a billion bucks each). Forget that Titanic won a record 11 Oscars including Best Picture. Forget that Titanic catapulted Leonardo DiCaprio, then 21, into the realm of global catnip. Now that Cameron's ship has sailed back to the multiplex, the question is: How is Titanic in 3D? The answer is pretty damn dazzling. Look, I hate retrofitted 3D as muc... | More »

Damsels in Distress

Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody

Directed by: Whit Stillman

Things are looking up: Whit Stillman has made another movie, his first since 1998's The Last Days of Disco completed the urbane, preppy trilogy begun with Metropolitan and Barcelona. So welcome Damsels in Distress, an exhilarating gift of a comedy about college, the female intellect, the limitless male ego, inventing a new dance, and suicide prevention. Greta Gerwig, the darling, leads the all-aces cast as Violet, a sophomore who yearns to make Seven Oaks U. a more congenial place for h... | More »

American Reunion

Jason Biggs, Chris Klein, Seann William Scott

Directed by: Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg

It's been 13 years since the first American Pie hit pay dirt with teens for bitch-slapping the guardians of good taste. Pie launched two lame legit sequels and four direct-to video abominations. But don't despair. American Reunion reminds us what we liked about the original, which featured four desperate-to-be-devirginized Michigan high school seniors – Jim (Jason Biggs), Oz (Chris Klein), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) and Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas). I'm not talking about th... | More »