What’s one to make of the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the best thing in his comeback film The Last Stand? Well, that the actor has learned a few things while being away for eight years and the movie simply isn’t very good. South Korean director Jee-woon Kim, helming his first stateside feature after making […]
Chuck Koplinski
Posted inArts & Culture
Squad a pretender in the gangster genre
While director Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad lets us know that it’s “inspired by a true story,” it becomes clear early on that it’s much more interested in the artifice of crime films rather than the hardboiled facts. To be sure, it’s a good-looking movie as the clothes, cars and locations all look of the post-WW […]
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Linings Cooper, Lawrence shine
Pat Jr. (Bradley Cooper) has a lot on his mind. His mother Delores (Jacki Weaver) has just sprung him from a mental institution after an eight-month stay. Seems, at home he had walked in on his wife Nikki (Brea Bee) and a co-worker taking a shower and nearly beat the guy to death. Well, can […]
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Acts of kindness buoy a harrowing Impossible
Director Juan Antonio Bayona puts us through the wringer with The Impossible, a harrowing film recounting one family’s improbable survival of the 2004 tsunami that occurred in the Indian Ocean. Employing cutting-edge special effects and an unflinching approach toward recreating the severity of the disaster which claimed an estimated 230,000 lives and displaced 1.7 million […]
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Zero’s cold, efficient look at hunt for bin Laden
Very rarely is a film able to capture current events in the way Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty does. Chronicling the United States’ efforts to capture Osama bin Laden, the project was in production before the leader’s death at the hands of Navy SEALs, necessitating a complete restructuring of the movie’s plot. It continues to […]
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Land doesn’t fulfill promise
While there’s never any doubt that Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land was made with the best of intentions, something goes slightly awry in the execution of this environmental awareness movie. Working from a screenplay by Matt Damon and John Krasinski (The Office), which was based on a story by Dave Eggers, the film sets out […]
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Cruise at home in Reacher
In light of recent events, it’s rather difficult watching the opening of Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher as a sniper picks off five innocent victims from a distance. I wouldn’t say the scene is done in a casual or callous way. At least until our collective sense of denial kicks in or memory fades, the lens […]
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Wreck-it Ralph’s clever odyssey
My father always used to say that he hated taking us to Disney animated films, yet I remember him being the one who laughed the most at what was happening on the screen. Of course, that’s the secret where making a full-length cartoon is concerned – you need to appeal not only to the kids […]
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Hitchcock too fractured
Much like the bathroom at the Bates Motel where Marion Crane met her untimely death, Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock is a bit of a mess. Attempting to tell the story about the making of one of the most notorious films of all time, while psychoanalyzing its director, is an intriguing story on paper. Not so in […]
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Softly a metaphor for our times
More like The Sopranos in tone and feel than Pulp Fiction, what with its lack of self-aware irony, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly has more than a few axes to grind. Intent on throwing the last two administrations under the bus for their causing and mishandling of the 2008 economic collapse, the writer/director uses the […]
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Rousing visuals and heartfelt message in soaring Guardians
When people console me for having to see every movie that comes out, even the ones that make going in for a root canal look like a more enjoyable option, I tell them that this aspect of being a film critic is not so bad. I know that if I keep my expectations low where […]
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The Sessions survives narrative oversight
You’d have to be a hardhearted individual indeed not to be moved by Mark O’Brien’s story. Having contracted polio at the age of six, the writer spends most of his time confined in an iron lung, a prison he’s dependent on for up to 19 hours a day. Yet, this hardly proves to be an […]
