As ominous and foreboding as one would suspect, The Purge is a suburban vigilante massacre movie wrapped tightly within a clever concept. The concept is that only one night each year, people can do whatever they want, up to and including […]
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Monsters University (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
Twelve years ago Pixar released Monsters, Inc., which was an interesting and entertaining divergence from their Toy Story films. I liked Monsters, Inc., though I didn’t love it. Now comes its prequel, which tells how one-eyed Mike Wazowski meets big, furry […]
Continue reading »Fast and Furious 6 (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
When the first film of what became the cornerstone for this series debuted in 2001, I was not impressed. I rated the first film one star and compared it to the Cannonball Run films of the early 1980s, while acknowledging that […]
Continue reading »After Earth (2013) ☆ 1/2
I’ve always enjoyed apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic adventures but After Earth has removed all the fun by staging the apocalypse that has forced mankind to evacuate the Earth some one thousand years before the beginning of the movie. In the weird universe […]
Continue reading »The Great Gatsby (2013) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Baz Luhrmann’s new version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic story — it was previously filmed in 1949 with Alan Ladd and 1974 with Robert Redford — is astonishingly visual, with glorious camera set-ups, color palates, slow-motion sequences and beautiful faces. […]
Continue reading »Mud (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
Storytelling is the essence of moviemaking, and yet many modern movies refuse, avoid or fail to put their running time to that purpose. Summer action movies especially are designed to overwhelm audiences with eye-popping visuals, kinetic movement and stylish posing […]
Continue reading »The Iceman (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
New Jersey is full of strange characters, and Richard Kuklinski was one of them. By night a mild-mannered film editor, through circumstance and blind luck by day he became a mafia hit man, allegedly dispatching more than one hundred victims […]
Continue reading »Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) ☆ ☆ 1/2
This second entry in the newly rebooted science-fiction series is a strange entity in that it not only continues the story of the first one (Star Trek, 2009), but also uses (steals?) a plot and character from one of the […]
Continue reading »Iron Man 3 (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
By and large I am not a fan of superhero movies. En masse they are colorful, action-filled entertainments, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But few of them, for me, elevate themselves to something greater. I suppose that is why […]
Continue reading »42 (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Movies involving sports successes are, by their very nature, inspirational. They celebrate whatever it is inside us that arises in competition and makes us perform better, faster, stronger or smarter than other people. Most everyone has dreamed of sports glory […]
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