Based on the novel “The True Meaning of Smekday” by Adam Rex, HOME is a sweet animated film that is equal parts cheery and poignant. Aimed more at kids than at adults, it takes the time-honored themes of friendship, family, and keeping promises and wraps them in an imaginative new package as shiny and inviting… Read More »
INSURGENT Keeps the DIVERGENT Franchise Puffing Along
The advantage of seeing outstanding actors in a middling film is that you can appreciate just how good they are on a whole new level. And INSURGENT is certainly a middling film, though that is an improvement on the last installment in this franchise, DIVERGENT. With a new director, Robert Schwentke, bringing Veronica Roth’s YA… Read More »
A Choppy CHAPPIE
CHAPPIE is a cross between Pinicchio and ROBOCOP with a dash of DISTRICT 9. That last is unsurprising because CHAPPIE is the brainchild of Neill Blomkamp, and many of the elements at work in that earlier film about the meaning of humanity are at work in this one. The battleground is still South Africa, Blomkamp’s… Read More »
SONG OF THE SEA is Beautiful Harmony
SONG OF THE SEA reminds us of the power of simplicity in storytelling and in animation. Hand-drawn and steeped in Irish folklore, it is a profoundly moving experience rife with charm, wisdom, and beauty. Told from a child’s perspective, the magical and the mundane coalesce in perfect harmony, revealing the one in the other in… Read More »
JUPITER ASCENDING. Not.
The Wachowskis know how to produce a spectacle. In that, they may very well be the cinematic heirs of Cecil B. DeMille, whose films featured showmanship of the highest caliber, but some of whose films could charitably be described as insubstantial. And such is the case with the space saga, JUPITER ASCENDING, a film chock-a-block… Read More »
PROJECT ALMANAC Flunks
After being delayed delayed half a year or so, PROJECT ALMANAC (aka WELCOME TO YESTERDAY and ALMANAC) has finally crept onto movie screens only to prove that waiting a year for its release would not have been nearly long enough. The trope of time travel and second chances has never been rendered in a more… Read More »
Just Try to Resist PADDINGTON
There is a certain trepidation that accompanies any screening of a film released in January. This is the graveyard of films that failed to meet studio expectations, but that for some reason or another, are due a theatrical release. There is even more trepidation when the film is one aimed at children. How bad, one… Read More »
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES
And so it is our last visit to Middle Earth, and a bittersweet one it is. Peter Jackson’s finale to his pair of trilogies is a triumph of spectacle and humanity, notwithstanding that the human beings of the piece are not the main characters. It’s only flaw, and that is a relative one, is that… Read More »
WALL-E
If you remember what the folks at PIXAR did with a pair of Luxo lamps and a bouncing ball 20 or so years ago, then you know that these animation wizards have an uncanny ability to imbue to the most unlikely of inanimate objects with a complex emotional life. Two decades on, a state-of-the art… Read More »
HANCOCK
John Hancock (Will Smith) is not your typical superhero, and HANCOCK is not your typical superhero film. It is as daring and audacious as its eponymous hero, venturing into realms of mythos and sentiment with equal dexterity and erudition. It’s one of the funniest flicks out this summer. It’s one of the most romantic. It’s… Read More »
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