Surprisingly intimate yet dealing with moral questions of epic proportion, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a movie befitting its subject as we know him. At once warm and folksy, at others fierce and impassioned, this is perhaps the most accessible film yet made about the Great Emancipator in terms of presenting him as a man – […]
Chuck Koplinski
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Washington soars in Flight
If you look back at the careers of the great screen actors and actresses, you’ll notice that after they’ve successfully established a recognizable persona, they begin to seek ways to break free from it. It must be a bore only playing slight variations of the same role all the time, and any performer worth their […]
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Skyfall returns Bond to solid ground
In a recent interview, director Sam Mendes stated that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight “gave me the confidence to take Skyfall in directions that might not have been possible before it had been released.” The second Batman movie was a wake-up call for the filmmaker and producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson as far […]
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Wallflower a sincere look at teen troubles
While everyone was falling all over themselves praising the films of John Hughes for their keen insight on the plight of teenagers, I couldn’t help but scoff at the “sincerity” found in The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and others of their ilk. I always felt that the cast, and Hughes himself, was commenting on […]
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Atlas tries but dies
To be sure, the big screen adaptation of David Mitchell’s best-selling novel Cloud Atlas is an ambitious undertaking. Its very nature has led some to say it’s a property that could not be done justice to as a movie, and there may be something to that. It’s a sprawling story composed of six different stories […]
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Activity 4 a bore
Having racked up serious box office and generally favorable reviews with the first three Paranormal Activity films, the producers of the series have finally gone to the well once too often. The fourth entry proves to be a tepid affair that elicits more snores than scares. While directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman impressed with […]
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Perry gets Cross-ed up
While I appreciate Tyler Perry’s desire to branch out from his “Medea” films, which have put him on the map as far as the movie community is concerned, I couldn’t imagine a worse breakout effort than his current feature Alex Cross. Based loosely on the twelfth novel in James Patterson’s best selling series that revolves […]
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More than meets the eye in Psychopaths
There is far more at play in Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths than witnessing acts of gruesome violence committed by a collection of certifiable nuts. Well, there is that but the subtext that McDonagh, who also wrote the screenplay, weaves throughout does an interesting job of deconstructing the very genre the film belongs to. Having written […]
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Horrific Sinister succeeds despite flaws
There is no question that Scott Derrickson’s Sinister is a flawed movie. While we expect horror films to test the boundaries where an audience’s suspension of disbelief is concerned, this movie obliterates it halfway through. And yet, the movie manages to keep us in its grip thanks to the pervasive sense of terror that Derrickson […]
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The Master a challenging look at the displaced
Since its premiere early this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, much of what’s been written about P.T. Anderson’s The Master has focused on the film’s complexity as well as the viewer’s inability to mine all it has to offer in a single viewing. This comes as no surprise as the director’s work is […]
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Realism makes Watch one of year’s best films
Cop movies are a dime a dozen and writer/director David Ayer has done more than his fair share to keep the genre alive. Having written the Oscar-winning Training Day, and the Kurt Russell feature Dark Blue, as well as directed Street Kings, the filmmaker has specialized in bringing a degree of authenticity to his work […]
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Starting up, Cirque spins its wheels
A trend has emerged where franchise filmmaking is concerned. Often, the second part of a given series of movies winds up being better than the first. So much time is spent in part one on the exposition necessary to set up the character’s background and situation, that there’s little space left for anything truly interesting […]
