Being a picky eater I don’t have the love affair with food that many people enjoy, and movies about food often bore me. That was not the case with Chef, a tour-de-force from Jon Favreau, who wrote, directed and stars […]
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The Fault in Our Stars (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆
It is sad and cruel when cancer strikes — especially when its target is young and otherwise healthy. The Fault in Our Stars, and presumably the book upon which it is based, suggests that pain and suffering, while hideously unfair, […]
Continue reading »How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
One of the greatest joys of movie watching occurs when a sequel is as good or better than the original, and such is the case with DreamWorks new animated movie, How to Train Your Dragon 2. I never quite connected […]
Continue reading »Million Dollar Arm (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆
I’m a big baseball fan, but I had never heard of the “Million Dollar Arm” contest, in which cricket players in India were given the opportunity to win baseball tryouts for major league teams. According to the movie, anyway, this […]
Continue reading »Maleficent (2014) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Although this isn’t really my kind of movie and I will probably never see it again, I must admit that I enjoyed Maleficent. If its inconsistencies could have been avoided it would be well worth watching; as it is, it’s […]
Continue reading »Ida (2013) ☆ ☆ ☆
This Polish drama from Pawel Pawlikowski is about as far removed from a Hollywood movie as can be produced. It is slowly paced, made with long, static camera shots using only natural light, about a character who rarely talks or […]
Continue reading »The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) ☆ ☆
It’s taken me about a month to get around to seeing this blockbuster action movie because I just couldn’t get excited about it. I liked Sam Raimi’s trilogy with Tobey Maguire and just don’t see the point of “re-imagining” the […]
Continue reading »Edge of Tomorrow (2014) ☆ ☆ 1/2
While he hasn’t made a lot of science-fiction films, I’ve liked the ones that Tom Cruise has made; I gave both Minority Report and Oblivion four stars apiece. Now he’s got another one, Edge of Tomorrow, a kind of Groundhog Day-alien invasion […]
Continue reading »A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) ☆ 1/2
Seth MacFarlane is a talented satirist who loves to riff on traditional entertainment elements. That’s fine, but he does so with the perspective of a young teenage boy who thinks profanity and scatological humor represent the highest order of humor. […]
Continue reading »X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) ☆ ☆ ☆
The X-Men series of films seem to be aspiring to ever greater heights as they progress, rewriting history in the creation of cinematic Marvel mythology. The most recent one re-imagined the Cuban Missile Crisis, while this one explains the assassination of JFK and involves […]
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