JUSTICE LEAGUE is a film with many problems. Some are inherent in an origin-style story that introduces several characters to what the filmmakers hope will be an audience eager to follow their further, individual, adventures. Some are just inexplicable. Take the plot device that is nothing short of asinine, and which I can’t discuss without… Read More »
LIVE BY NIGHT
LIVE BY NIGHT is so sumptuously photographed that it can almost make up for its shortcomings. Based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, it has weathered its translation by becoming a slight story heinously overblown. It also suffers from too many false endings. So many, in fact, that I can’t vouch… Read More »
THE ACCOUNTANT
THE ACCOUNTANT is a flabby, overlong film with an earnest mission to make us all think differently about autism, and also to give us the cheap thrill of seeing justice meted out to those slimy financiers who manipulate high finance to the detriment of the little guys at the bottom of that particular food chain.… Read More »
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE
For most of BATMAN V SUPERMAN’s bloviated pretension, I was merely bored. This half-baked idea studded with ponderous pronouncements, shockingly sedate action sequences, and the simulacrum of serious philosophical inquiry plodded along, weighed down by an overstuffed plot and an underdeveloped narrative. But when we arrived at a meticulous recreation of the deposition from the… Read More »
EXTRACT
There is a poetic, if not necessarily gentle, justice to Mike Judges paean to the working man and woman, EXTRACT. Not all of them are smart, but they all have an affinity for their chosen field, and a willingness to go all the way to achieve their respective dreams. Its bedrock American values skewed through… Read More »
RUNNER RUNNER
Few things in life are quite as irksome as a film that thinks its clever when its anything but. Such is the case of the would-be thriller, RUNNER, RUNNER. In its inept attempts to mix current events with action tropes, it becomes a lackadaisical mishmash of scenes stitched together with a hope, a prayer, and… Read More »
GONE GIRL
GONE GIRL is an elegantly rendered, yet lurid potboiler of a movie. Director David Fincher brings his characteristic darkness, literal and figurative to an already dark tale of subterfuge, murder, and the secrets we keep from everyone, including ourselves. Based on the novel of the same name by screenwriter Gillian Flynn, it gifts us with… Read More »
DAREDEVIL
Maybe it’s time to say something out loud that many of us have been thinking about Ben Affleck’s career at least since PEARL HARBOR. The only thing that could possibly explain why it refuses to die the death it so richly deserves is that Mr. Affleck must have at some point made a pact with… Read More »
GIGLI
If GIGLI were any worse than it is, it would require special HAZMET handling. It transcends merely bad, merely tedious, merely irksome and plummets into that very special category of film, the one that so tries and tortures its audience that, emerging again from the soul-sucking black hole of celluloid disaster, it no longer fears… Read More »
PAYCHECK
Click here to listen to the interview with John Woo.After a brief excursion into the uncertain waters of reel history with WINDTALKERS, John Woo has returned to the action/martial arts genre he does so well with PAYCHECK. Based on the short story by Philip K. Dick, it starts with the classic Hitchcock formula of a… Read More »