Reviews
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D+ |
** |
-2|
Adults
If you are in love with the 1970s and Johnny Depp, perhaps you will enjoy this. Andrew O’Hehir says he knew he would love the film when he spotted a banana-seat Schwinn bicycle leaning against the front porch of Collinwood in an early scene. All right. But then comes a “happening” featuring Alice Cooper as himself (!), with a disco ball and cage dancers. At Collinwood. Is this really anyone’s idea of a good time?
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A |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
If
The Avengers isn’t necessarily the
best superhero movie ever made, it is unquestionably the
most superhero movie ever made — and, in that capacity, it is more than well-made enough to take comic-book entertainment to unprecedented levels. We might possibly see a better film later this summer, but if there’s a more enjoyable popcorn action movie this year than
The Avengers, I’ll eat my hat.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
An Aardman film is always an exercise in absurdity, but
The Pirates, directed by Peter Lord (
Chicken Run) and Jeff Newitt, is possibly their silliest ever. This is the kind of film in which people say things like “Blood Island! So called because …it is the exact shape of some blood!” And: “You can’t always say
Arrrrr! at the end of a sentence and think that makes everything all right.” And: “London town: the most romantic city in the world.” (Followed by: “London smells like Grandma!”) Those crazy Brits!
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B |
*** |
+2-1|
Kids & Up
Disneynature’s
Chimpanzee has the makings of a great nature documentary. It takes us places other films haven’t and shows us sights we haven’t seen on any screen. Visually, it’s a triumph of intripid nature documentary filmmaking, with an extraordinary and heartwarming twist in the lives of a chimpanzee community. Yet like other recent nature flicks, including
Arctic Tale and
African Cats, it’s wrapped in increasingly tiresome, condescending kiddie-movie packaging. It’s like discovering a rare dish prepared by eminent chefs, drizzled with waxy treacle and stuffed in a Happy Meal box.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
In a way it’s like the antithesis of a Dan Brown novel. Brown’s stories peer with feverish, lurid imagination at the inner workings of the Catholic hierarchy, discovering all manner of ridiculous subterfuge, ruthlessness and skulduggery. Moretti’s film hardly peers at all. It’s good-natured and inoffensive, regarding the cardinals with gentle amusement. But there’s no complexity or ambiguity, no depth or insight.
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B |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
What’s the last movie you saw that created an imaginary world that was actually beautiful, bursting with color and beauty and inspiration? A world that reminded you of the feeling you had as a child the first time you saw Dorothy open that door on the Technicolor world of Oz? A world you would actually like to enter and walk around in?
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D |
*½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
“Let’s have some fun,” says one god to another, suggesting that they “put on a show.” The moment comes late in
Wrath of the Titans. Very, very late. I don’t remember the response, if any, but “Why start now?” would have been appropriate.
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B- |
**½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
October Baby is at its most thoughtful contemplating Hannah’s unresolved feelings about her biological mother and the tragic way that her life began. She may not find the missing piece of her life she was looking for, but she unexpectedly finds another missing piece instead: one that, in a way, could explain the undefined sense of loss in her life.
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B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Suzanne Collins says she got the idea for
The Hunger Games while sleepily flicking channels between some reality-show game and footage of the invasion of Iraq until the images began to blur in her mind. What’s bracing about Gary Ross’ film of the first book in Collins’ wildly popular young-adult trilogy is that the topicality of the story’s origins still comes across. When was the last Hollywood science-fiction action blockbuster that felt like actual ideas about the world we live in were at stake?
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B- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Burroughs didn’t invent science fiction, but he perhaps created a genre of
serial sci-fi fantasy adventure, with an idealized action hero going from one extraterrestrial adventure to another. Carter’s closest literary ancestor may be Sinbad from
One Thousand and One Nights, which is saying something. Buck Rogers, James Kirk and Luke Skywalker are all his descendants, and Jake Sully — the hero of
Avatar, which really
is a patchwork borrowing from everything Burroughs inspired — is perhaps more indebted to John Carter than any other character in history.
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C |
**½ |
+1-1|
Kids & Up
Well … its heart’s in the right place. Give the filmmakers that.
This isn’t
The Grinch or
The Cat in the Hat.
It’s not outright ugly, though it slips off the rails.
It wants to be decent. It tries. But it fails.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
The Secret World of Arrietty just might change the way you look at the world around you — right around you. A wide-eyed sense of discovery and revelation permeates the film, and what it reveals is … the mystery and wonder of an ordinary home.
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C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Adults
The Grey is a thoughtful, tough-minded little tale of survival and attrition that sets its sights a bit further than its firepower takes it.
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B- |
**½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
For
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, who stars as a young solicitor named Arthur Kipps,
The Woman in Black is an opportunity to make a reasonably graceful break from the role that has dominated his life since childhood. For the new owners of England’s legendary Hammer horror brand, until recently dormant from the 1970s, it’s an opportunity to stake their claim to continuing in the tradition of Terence Fisher, Jimmy Sangster et al. For curious movie watchers, it’s an opportunity to see how Radcliffe does in another role — and how an old-fashioned haunted house story plays today.
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B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
In
War Horse Spielberg harkens back to an earlier cinematic age, creating something more like a Golden Age Hollywood epic than any film I’ve seen in years, the one other notable example being Baz Luhrmann’s
Australia.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0-1|
Kids & Up*
Tintin in the comics was the perpetual small-town boy next door. Tintin in the movie is like the boy next door who’s been watching “Mantracker,” “Man vs. Wild” and “Mythbusters” for so long that he’s completely jaded to reality.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Brad Bird’s
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is so preposterously entertaining that it makes watching other recent Hollywood action spectacles feel like work. What in the last few years even compares to it?
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
This is quite deliberately
not a reboot or reimagining or any such thing. Perhaps we can call it a revisiting. Like this summer’s charming
Winnie the Pooh (also from Disney),
The Muppets is a happy throwback, very much of a piece with material that my generation grew up with, eclipsing the lameness of recent direct-to-video efforts. Who would have thought two classic family franchises that have lain fallow for so long would be reborn in the same year?
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D+ |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
Little ones are “tougher than we think,” a penguin remarks in
Happy Feet Two, and you can tell director George Miller believes it. The animated sequel pulls few punches: It’s overshadowed by more darkness, menace, heartache and anxiety than any talking-animal picture I can think of since, well, Miller’s last family-film sequel, the execrable
Babe: Pig in the City. Neither the classic
Babe nor the original
Happy Feet contained any hint of the darkness of the sequels. Apparently Miller’s strategy is to soften kids up first, then drop the bomb.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
The life and work of J. Edgar Hoover offers grist for a dozen different movies or more, and Clint Eastwood’s
J. Edgar wants to be all of them at once. It’s the sort of staidly respectable, competently directed biopic that gives a bad name to competently directed biopics, and possibly to respectability.
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B+ |
*** |
+2-2|
Kids & Up*
Banderas’s swashbuckling Puss in Boots first appeared in
Shrek 2, quickly establishing himself as one of the most popular supporting characters in the franchise. Now in a starring role in this spinoff, Puss spins the story in a direction strikingly different from the Shrek films.
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B- |
**½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
The movie is full of Catholic iconography that Catholic viewers and fans of Golden Age Hollywood Catholicism will appreciate. Statues of Jesus, Mary and the saints are everywhere. I compared the movie’s Catholic milieu to a Bing Crosby film, but a Crosby film would actually have edgier personalities and more conflict.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Adults
There is a moment in
The Mill & the Cross in which the power of art, in particular sacred art, to capture the eternal in the hugger-mugger of ordinary life — even in the most horrific and seemingly meaningless events — is revealed with stunning clarity. André Bazin, the great Catholic film critic and theorist, wrote about the mission of art to rescue the world from transience and corruption, to capture moments and events in time and space before they slip into the irretrievable past, and so bear witness to the hand of God in creation. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this idea more resoundingly affirmed than in
The Mill & the Cross.
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C- |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
The upshot is that this new
Footloose is a dumbed-down, sexed-up take on a story that was already risqué and not too bright — one that shies away from the ’84 film’s critique of the church, but is also further from its lingering Christian worldview.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up
Real Steel is just plain unpleasant to sit through. So much of the movie is spent amid screaming crowds and abrasive music, often in dark, trashy dives, watching giant robots pound each other into scrap metal. The robot boxing is surprisingly good (Sugar Ray Leonard was a consultant). It’s the humans that are unpleasant.
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B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
Is there grace for such pilgrims as these? Perhaps, but it may not take the form they seem to be seeking. At the end of the road, some viewers might feel let down at what has not changed for the main characters, but perhaps this is to miss the change that matters most. Emilio has said that the film is “pro-people, pro-life.” So it is, in more ways than one.
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C+ |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Chronologically,
The Lion King stands between the striking triumphs of the early Disney renaissance (
The Little Mermaid,
Beauty and the Beast and
Aladdin) and the bumpy deterioration of the latter 1990s (
Pocahontas,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Hercules, etc.). One way or another, it’s at the turning point between Disney’s creative renewal and its eventual decline. Fans might locate it near the pinnacle, along with
Beauty and the Beast, but I don’t feel the love.
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B- |
**½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
Coming on the heels of
Fireproof,
Courageous is the fourth film from Sherwood Pictures, and it’s another step forward for the church-based film company … While the film’s church-based roots and the tendency toward didactic, schematic storytelling are still in evidence,
Courageous is their most ambitious and watchable film to date.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Moneyball is an ugly name for such an exhilarating film. Indeed, it seems a misnomer, though the filmmakers were more or less stuck with it, since Michael Lewis’s explosive 2003 book, on which the film is based, made such an impact on the baseball world that the word has passed into baseball jargon.
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C |
** |
-2|
Adults
How could anyone in Hollywood have known, as the current batch of movies went into development, that at least three different films about the greed and ruthlessness of the wealthy few and its devastating impact on the masses—the 1% and the 99%—would hit theaters more or less simultaneously in the middle of the Occupy protests?
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