I have been remiss lately about keeping up with reviews, and this movie is to blame. I’ve had a difficult time deciding where I stand on it. On one hand, Andrew Dominik’s low-key mobster film is as intricately written as […]
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Silver Linings Playbook (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆
I’ve been trying to find an accurate, descriptive term for Silver Linings Playbook and the best I can generate is “unconventional love story.” It isn’t really a comedy, though some of it is pretty funny, and it isn’t really a drama, […]
Continue reading »Red Dawn (2012) ☆ ☆
Imagine if you will that North Korea, with the help of Soviet Russia, uses an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) weapon against the western United States and then takes advantage of our downed defenses to invade Spokane, Washington. That is the premise […]
Continue reading »Lincoln (2012) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Every new Steven Spielberg movie is an event for me; I consider him to be the greatest American filmmaker of our time. Spielberg’s best films have an immediacy that brings magic to our mundane reality, and which bring the unbelievable […]
Continue reading »Wreck-It Ralph (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
Disney studios’ newest animated movie is a loving tribute to the video arcade games so popular twenty and thirty years ago. It is nostalgic but not overly sentimental, preferring to update its old-time protagonists into the more modern universe of […]
Continue reading »Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012) ☆ ☆ 1/2
The end has finally arrived for The Twilight Saga, in a fifth film that brings the story to a crescendo of decapitating action before freeing its vampires and shape-shifters to follow their dreams. If, indeed, vampires and shape-shifters dream, since […]
Continue reading »Skyfall (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆
Skyfall is a strange, atypical James Bond adventure. It doesn’t look, feel or sound like a Bond film at various points, and yet the overriding feeling at the end is that the series has restarted, and in a good way. I […]
Continue reading »The Sessions (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
It would be easy to label The Sessions as Helen Hunt’s sex movie, since she portrays a sex surrogate and is naked for much of her performance, but that would be a disservice to the potency of Ben Lewin’s movie. The […]
Continue reading »October Sky (1999) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
Movies about astronomy, space exploration and the wonders beyond our own planet rarely fail to inspire me; one of the finest is October Sky (1999). Based on NASA engineer Homer Hickam’s recounting of his formative years in West Virginia’s coal […]
Continue reading »Teachers (1984) ☆ ☆ ☆
Teachers (1984) is not the freshest or most original movie about the difficulties modern educators face in an urban public school setting, but it has a lot to say about those difficulties. Furthermore, it does so with clever, dark humor, […]
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