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 »Category: Recent Releases
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 »Cloud Atlas (2012) ☆ ☆
Cloud Atlas is a sprawling, ambitious drama with a strong cast, intriguing science-fiction elements, solid production values and impressive visuals. But it’s also a big mess without a unifying theme. Six stories set in time periods varying from 1850 to the […]
Continue reading »Flight (2012) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Sometimes you walk into a movie theater expecting a certain kind of movie and walk out having seen something completely different. It can be disconcerting, and even create a negative reaction just because it something unexpected. This is the reaction […]
Continue reading »Alex Cross (2012) ☆ ☆
If Summit Entertainment is hoping that Alex Cross is going to start another popular film franchise (the almost finished Twilight series is theirs), that hope is misguided. James Patterson’s inimitable forensic psychologist-detective was played in two previous films (Kiss the Girls, Along […]
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