THE GUILT TRIP could have gone many ways, most of them unfortunate. Yet, in the able hands of Barbra Steisand and Seth Rogan, what could have been a painful excursion into the murky depths of schmaltz is, instead, a sharp and funny look at mother love and filial duty and what happens when the two… Read More »
CIRQUE DU SOLEIL — WORLDS AWAY 3D
Cirque du Soleil never really found a purchase in those specials to be found on television. The small screen was far too diminutive, even in its larger versions, to convey the ambitious, aethereal, and surrealistic flights of fancy that are the Cirques trademark. That and the inherent flatness of the medium. All that has been… Read More »
PARENTAL GUIDANCE
PARENTAL GUIDANCE is a sloppy concretion inadvertently showcasing pretty much everything that can be done wrong in filmmaking short of forgetting to remove the lens cap. Though in this case, that last might actually have been an improvement. The story is incoherent, the characters are as thin as the wispiest of vapors, and the jokes,… Read More »
7 BOXES (7 CAJAS)
7 BOXES is a film full of piquant revelations. Steeped in the seamy underbelly of Paraguay urban culture, it is a suspenseful noir with absurdist overtones sharply defined by filmmakers Tana Schembori and Juan Carlos Meneglia. Wonderfully original and wildly unpredictable, it will make more than one viewer ask why there arent more films from… Read More »
THE GREY
The best moment, the one that perfectly sums up THE GREY, is the one where a character has decided to die. Not because pain and fatigue suffered by that character have muddled his judgment and clouded his mind, though the actor involved certainly brings that, no, the decision to die is more transcendent than that,… Read More »
THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS
PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS is a gleefully revisionist take on pirates, royalty, and the early 19th-century scientific community. Brought to animated life by the fine folks at Aardman Studio with their distinctive stop-motion brilliance, and a dash of CGI, the film also features 3-D that is used cleverly but without ostentation. Clever is the byword… Read More »
GREY, THE
The best moment, the one that perfectly sums up THE GREY, is the one where a character has decided to die. Not because pain and fatigue suffered by that character have muddled his judgment and clouded his mind, though the actor involved certainly brings that, no, the decision to die is more transcendent than that,… Read More »
FRIENDS WITH KIDS
Best friends Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) think they have it all figured out when it comes to having it all. Having seen the toll that the introduction of childbearing has taken on the relationships of their hip and ecstatically happy married friends, they turn cerebral about the most primal of instincts and… Read More »
HUNGER GAMES, THE
The politics of THE HUNGER GAMES, based on the hugely popular novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins, are never far from the action. Yet the premise, a futuristic yet oddly familiar society operating after the collapse of the United States, one that keeps its poor and downtrodden firmly under heel by turning them… Read More »
KILLER JOE
There are truths about human nature that only brutality in its rawest form can depict. Such is the concept embraced with both verve and style by William Friedkin in KILLER JOE, a tale of moral compasses gone askew, dysfunctional family dynamics taken to their logical extreme, and human life reduced to a commodity on a… Read More »
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