Reviews
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F |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Zookeeper is offensive to women, men, children, parents, WASPs, Asians, African-Americans, animals and zookeepers. Also Nick Nolte fans may not be too happy. Have I overstated things? Possibly, but how will we ever know? It is a movie with no conceivable audience. Somewhere in Hollywood are producers who entrusted money and equipment to people who put talking zoo animals in the same movie as Kevin James inadvertently flashing Rosario Dawson and Leslie Bibb with his off-camera member. “Oh! That’s going to be hard to unsee,” Dawson exclaims in dismay. Parents: Think long and hard about those words.
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C- |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
It is with some astonishment that I realize that until now Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts have never played romantic leads opposite each other in a romantic comedy.
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F |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Like the title phrase, which is recognizably English and yet obviously wrong,
Dark of the Moon offers just enough vestiges of grammatical intelligibility to be recognizable as a bloated, steroid-inflamed simulacrum of a mindless summer blockbuster action movie. I almost think it would be better, or at least it would hurt less, if it were a bit more incomprehensible, although I’m told that its predecessor,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, actually was, and it didn’t help.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Visuals aside,
Cars 2 is the first Pixar film ever (or at least since
A Bug’s Life) that could one could easily imagine as a DreamWorks film—circa
Shark Tale perhaps, with its punningly fishified analog of the human world. Or, with its frenetic action and gimmickry,
Cars 2 bears some resemblance to a Blue Sky Studios cartoon (circa
Robots, say, or
Rio, with its world culture flavor). In a word, not only is
Cars 2 mediocre, it doesn’t even feel like mediocre Pixar.
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B+ |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults
It’s a nostalgic film about nostalgia — nostalgia for when Paris was Paris, for one thing. Even if you’ve never been to the City of Light, even if phrases like “the Lost Generation” and “la Belle Époque” hold for you none of the magic they do for Allen, the film makes you feel their power for his onscreen alter ego, appealingly played by Owen Wilson. For that matter, even if you aren’t an Allen fan — even if you aren’t convinced Allen was
ever Allen —
Midnight in Paris could almost make you nostalgic for the Allen that fans remember, or seem to.
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D |
*½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
While the Atwaters’ book is not exactly a classic, it’s beloved by generations of readers — but not by the people who have brought you this big-screen adaptation starring Jim Carrey. The makers of this film do not love
Mr. Popper’s Penguins. At all. It’s hard to believe that this junk was directed by Mark Waters, who presided over the big-screen adaptation of
The Spiderwick Chronicles, a smart, scary adaptation of a children’s book series that honors its source material almost as much as
Mr. Popper’s Penguins doesn’t.
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C+ |
**½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
If only the filmmakers had put as much creative energy into the character of Hal Jordan as they did into his lovingly rendered CGI-enhanced suit, which pulses and glows as it hugs every bulge and swell on Ryan Reynolds’ impeccably sculpted torso.
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Gone are the days when a movie like
E.T. could open to a mere $11 million, build on word of mouth, and go on to earn more than $350 million in North America. Obviously, Abrams remembers those days. In a way,
Super 8 is as derivative and familiar as anything in theaters today, only the movies it’s copying are all over a quarter of a century old: Spielbergian fare like
The Goonies,
E.T.,
Gremlins and
Close Encounters, with echoes of earlier and later films.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
Despite missteps,
X‑Men: First Class succeeds in doing in some measure for the X‑Men what J. J. Abrams did for
Star Trek two years ago: Not only does it bring new energy to a tired franchise, it reinvents a familiar cast of characters in unexpected ways, laying the foundations for the defining relationships and conflicts of later chapters, while telling a ripping story into the bargain.
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B |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Returning screenwriters Jonathan Abel and Glenn Berger recognize that what’s needed is deeper emotions and darker themes as well as more action and higher stakes … At the same time, the movie makes three key mistakes.
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C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up
Was Catholic novelist Tim Powers’ 1987 historical fantasy-adventure novel
On Stranger Tides in some way the inspiration, or an inspiration, not only for this fourth Pirates of the Caribbean flick, but for the whole franchise?
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F |
*½ |
-4|
Director Scott Charles Stewart seems to be making a career out of erasing Jesus from history, and celebrating supernatural heroes who rebel against God for the greater good … in apocalyptic action/horror movies starring Paul Bettany.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
It starts pretty promisingly, and it stays pretty promising throughout, and at some point you realize it’s never actually going to deliver on that promise. There’s never a moment where it goes really wrong — it just never really gets started.
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C |
*½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
As played by English actor Charlie Cox (
Stardust), Josemaría emerges as a likable, dedicated, virtuous young man much loved by his circle of friends, the first generation of Opus Dei. There are a few evocative scenes, such as the impression that a barefoot friar’s tracks in the snow make on the young Josemaría. Yet despite a line or two about Opus Dei spreading to other countries, there’s little sense of Escrivá himself as a figure of any particular note.
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B+ |
***½ |
+1-2|
Kids & Up*
From the arches of the Carioca Aqueduct to Sugarloaf Mountain, from the flamboyant costumes of the samba schools to the sundrenched beaches of Guanabara Bay,
Rio is as colorful a look at a faraway world as kids are likely to get without reading subtitles.
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A |
***½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
Credibly researched by screenwriter James Solomon and beautifully filmed by Newton Thomas Sigel (
The Usual Suspects,
Three Kings,
Valkryie), it’s a rare historical drama that credibly captures a sense of another era while allowing its characters to breathe and talk and argue like men and women living in the present tense.
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D- |
* |
-2|
Kids & Up*
Hop is the kind of movie that makes helpless critics wish we could stage an intervention. Parents! It doesn’t have to come to this!
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B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Really,
Born to Be Wild is as much a celebration of the better side of human nature as of the natural world. In their own way, these ladies are carrying out the Edenic mandate given to Adam to take responsibility for creation, to tend the garden and share in God’s providential oversight of the animal world (cf.
CCC #373).
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B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Soul Surfer does nearly everything you expect it to, but it does it more likably and satisfyingly than you might think it would. Based on 21-year-old pro surfer Bethany Hamilton’s memoir
Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family and Fighting to Get Back on the Board, it’s an inspirational sports biopic about a Hawaiian surfer whose devout faith helps her bounce back after losing an arm in a shark attack (at 13 in real life).
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B+ |
***½ |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
One could almost regard
Moon as a warm-up for
Source Code. Both films center on a solitary grunt who’s a cog in a much larger machine — an isolated man squirreled away in a cold, metallic space, unable to contact his loved ones, unsure exactly what’s going on, caught up in the seemingly impossible circumstances of a mission he doesn’t entirely understand. Both films raise questions of identity, memory, and human dignity in dehumanizing systems.
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D |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up
Red Riding Hood is a movie of a sort that I would very much like to see if anyone could make it, which is another way of saying that it is not that sort of movie at all. A real Hollywood fairy tale is the rarest thing in the world. Hollywood is more comfortable with myth and legend. Partly, I think, it’s a matter of scale: Mythology provides the sort of sweeping, epic scope that lends itself to big-screen Hollywood feature filmmaking. Fairy tales are smaller and more intimate, and require a lighter touch.
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A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up
Xavier Beauvois’ sublime
Of Gods and Men is that almost unheard-of film that you do not judge—it judges you. To one degree or another it defies every attempt to put it in a box, to reduce its challenge to a political or pious ideological stance to be affirmed or critiqued.
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B |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults
Part Hollywood romance, part paranoia thriller,
The Adjustment Bureau is an enjoyable romp in large part on the strength of Damon and Blunt’s likability and chemistry — qualities notably absent in recent star vehicles like
The Tourist and
Knight and Day.
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F |
* |
-3|
Adults*
The shocking thing about
Sanctum’s fictional survival story, relocated to Papua New Guinea, is not that it kills off one expedition member after another, often quite brutally. The shocking thing is how callously it treats their lives. More than one team member is
euthanized by his fellows, submerged and drowned after sustaining catastrophic injuries.
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B |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up*
In some ways, Mikael Håfström’s new film reminds me less of recent exorcism films than of the sort of movie that Terence Fisher made for Hammer Films in the late 1950s and 1960s, movies like
The Devil Rides Out and the 1958
Dracula. If Father Lucas, an unconventional veteran exorcist working in Rome, had been played by Hammer icon Christopher Lee instead of Anthony Hopkins, he would have been right at home.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
The Coens’ film is franker than its predecessor about the violence of the old West and of Portis’s book; it is also franker about the religiosity, from frequent scriptural references to a score shot through with hymnody.
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C+ |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
In the years since
Tron, of course, video games have come closer and closer to approximating reality, and computer-graphics in movies have gone further still — and, in a way, this is the problem with
Tron: Legacy.
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B- |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults
Kidman and Eckhart embody Becca and Howie with such unforced ease, interacting so naturally in both relaxed and tense moments, that they seem to be not so much playing characters as playing a relationship — a fragile, troubled marriage with a long history, in which more is unsaid than said.
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B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Is it possible that the makers of
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader have made the best film in the series to date while charting a course even further from the book? I think it is. Perhaps it’s even
because the film diverges from the book to the extent that it does that I’m able to regard the film more for what it is than for what it isn’t.
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B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Kids & Up
We really do accept as normal whatever we’re raised with, don’t we? Like, say you’ve lived all your life alone in a lonely tower in a hidden valley, and your golden hair is 70 feet long, and the only mother you’ve ever known — the only person you ever see — comes and goes using your hair as a rope ladder, and she’s never let you so much as set one foot outside, and your hair does this magic trick when you sing that — well, not to give it away, but that would just be life to you, wouldn’t it?
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