Albert Nobbs was not my cup of tea, but it could possibly be yours. I’m not a big fan of period pieces, but I thought that by virtue of an incredible performance by Glenn Close, I would transcend my prejudice. Was Close’s performance technically excellent? Yes, probably. She had the accent, the gait, the look, [...]
Read More Albert Nobbs, drama, Glenn Close, Janet McTeer, joyce, Mia Wasikowska, Rodrigo Garcia
You’d think a movie about Liam Neeson duking it out with wolves in the wild would be exciting. You’d be wrong. Turns out The Grey, a macho but mushy existential survival tale directed by Joe Carnahan, is actually quite a slog — dreary, overly talky and capped by one of those maddeningly ambiguous endings that [...]
Read More action, adventure, Dallas Roberts, David, Dermot Mulroney, drama, Frank Grillo, Joe Carnahan, Liam Neeson, The Grey
In Chronicle we get one of the year’s best films, a fun and cool and awesome piece of lower-budget sci-fi that uses the found footage format, a simple but neat premise and seamless special effects to deftly detail in larger-than-life fashion what I imagine are the horrors of being a bullied teenager today. Dreamed up [...]
Read More Chronicle, Dane DeHaan, David, drama, Josh Trank, Max Landis, Sci-Fi, thriller
If, like me, you can watch the first and last episodes of Freaks and Geeks over and over again just to see Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) dancing to Styx and The Grateful Dead with joyous abandon, you’ll know why I chose to review Return. Cardellini finally, finally
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Poetry. We’re stymied by it. The stack of “great” books we don’t read on vacation will be missing even the slimmest tome of verse. On the page or as “spoken word” performance,
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Mark Wahlberg’s new action thriller, the New Orleans-set Contraband, is the cinematic equivalent of settling, a movie that’s not bad nor especially good, but has just enough going for it that you won’t necessarily regret spending two hours watching it.
Read MoreWhere did Michael Fassbender come from? It’s a legitimate question. The Irish actor seems to have been a presence in films for years, but, in truth, has only been seen on the big screen for a handful, after spending his formative time as an addendum on BBC police procedurals. After a stint in UK horror, [...]
Read MoreBoy, that Meryl Streep really is a great actress, isn’t she? And her makeup guy, too. He’s way better than whoever Eastwood hired to do DiCaprio in J. Edgar.
Read More“War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.” When Winston Churchill wrote those words in the years after World War I, he was certainly in part lamenting the passing into history of the war horse, the millennia-old instrument of warfare who was conditioned (as was the man on its [...]
Read MoreDirected by Cameron Crowe, We Bought a Zoo is the story of Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) who moves his two kids Dylan and Rosie (Colin Ford and Maggie Elizabeth Jones) to a dilapidated zoo, to get away from all the reminders of his recently deceased wife. Dylan is a dark and moody teenager, and Rosie [...]
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