Stop-motion animation has been around since the silents of the 1920s, made famous by practitioners such as Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Will Vinton and Nick Park. Park works for Aardman Animation, the company that produced Chicken Run and the Wallace and […]
Continue reading »Category: Recent Releases
Irrational Man (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
Woody Allen’s films are considered light entertainment, even when they delve into darker elements of human interaction. The newest example of this is Irrational Man, a comedic drama which follows a troubled philosophy professor to a summer gig at a […]
Continue reading »Ant-Man (2015) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Superheroes come in all shapes and sizes, and now one is the size of an ant. He is Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and he is an ex-con, an industrial cat burglar. Fate, in the form of Dr. Hank Pym (Michael […]
Continue reading »Trainwreck (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
I have never been a big fan of Judd Apatow’s. I find his films to be crude, lewd and rude, without enough dramatic counterbalance. But perhaps I’ve been too rash in my dismissal of Apatow, because Trainwreck is somewhat different for […]
Continue reading »Paper Towns (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
I liked The Fault in Our Stars last year, and I think Paper Towns, based on a book by the same author, is even better. It creates multidimensional, realistic teenage characters of a nerdy bent (they’re in band, get good grades, […]
Continue reading »Southpaw (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
I have come to believe that it is rather difficult to make an uninteresting or non-compelling boxing movie. At the center are two men (or women) in primal form, knocking the snot out of each other, often in slow motion […]
Continue reading »Pixels (2015) ☆ ☆ 1/2
It’s been a while since Adam Sandler actually produced or starred in anything of cinematic value. Pixels actually comes close. It has ambition; it wants to become the Ghostbusters of the arcade video game era. With a stronger script and less rambling […]
Continue reading »Terminator: Genisys (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
I love the Terminator. Not the cyborg so much, but the first, low-budget film in 1984, co-written and directed by James Cameron. It’s as close to a perfect little movie as one can get, astonishing in its execution. Most people […]
Continue reading »Mr. Holmes (2015) ☆ ☆ 1/2
There have been many successful stand-alone films about Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle (as opposed to the famous series with Basil Rathbone), and now Ian McKellen is playing Holmes as a real person, years after […]
Continue reading »Self/Less (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
I appreciate when a “high-concept” science-fiction thriller or action movie boasts enough ambition to address large questions; that’s much of what makes the genre my all-time favorite. Self/Less questions mankind’s quest for immortality, wondering whether sacrifices made to gain immortality are […]
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