Posted January 29, 2014in Film Review
“Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” 3 stars Rated PG-13 105 minutes Action Starring: Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, Keira Knightley For a no-frills spy thriller, Kenneth Branagh directs a respectable rendering of Tom Clancy’s well-worn Jack Ryan superspy character. Still, Branagh is no action-film director, and it shows. Chase-scenes cut away too
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Posted January 22, 2014in Film Review
“Lone Survivor” 2 stars Rated R 121 minutes Action Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch All films are political. All film is propaganda. Knowing that Peter Berg’s seemingly straight-ahead war picture is little more than a two-hour recruitment commercial designed for the U.S. military to attract testosterone-bubbling American males
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Posted January 15, 2014in Film Review
“The Invisible Woman” 4 stars Rated R 111 minutes Biography Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Kristin Scott Thomas She walks in long skirts at a swift tempo across the windswept ocean shoreline every morning, traveling to her job as a drama teacher to elementary school children at a protestant school.
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Posted January 08, 2014in Film Review
“The Wolf of Wall Street” Rated R 180 minutes Crime Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie There is no reason to see Martin Scorsese’s latest picture. Centered around its irredeemable greed-crazed anti-hero antagonist Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), “The Wolf of Wall Street” is an oddly inert piece of capitalist
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Posted January 01, 2014in Film Review
“Out of the Furnace” 3 stars Rated R 106 minutes Crime Starring: Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Zoe Saldana Scott Cooper’s American character study-thriller bursts at the seams. After his directorial debut with “Crazy Heart,” director/co-screenwriter Cooper returns from his Oscar win with a sophomore movie that fulfills his promise as
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Posted December 26, 2013in Film Review
“Her” 2 stars Rated R 120 minutes Comedy Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson Where Spike Jonze once soared using magical realism — albeit written by someone else — as his guide (see “Being John Malkovich”), he now flounders with a self-penned technology-driven story that shrivels before your eyes.
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Posted December 18, 2013in Film Review
“August: Osage County” 3 stars Rated R 121 minutes Comedy Starring: Meryl Streep, Dermot Mulroney, Julia Roberts Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play loses an hour-and-a-half from its original running time, but none of its dramatic impact in the playwright’s own screenplay adaptation. Arriving during the holidays, when American family members
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Posted December 11, 2013in Film Review
“American Hustle” 3 stars Rated R 129 minutes Drama Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper If awards were handed out for the sloppiest movies, “American Hustle” would be a dead ringer for just such a booby prize. The damn thing is all over the place. It can’t decide if
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Posted December 04, 2013in Film Review
“Inside Llewyn Davis” 5 stars Rated R 105 minutes Drama Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman The Coen brothers are master curators of culture. You can see it as far back as their debut film, “Blood Simple,” a gritty neo-noir that exulted in the genre’s tightly knit excesses of
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Posted November 27, 2013in Film Review
“Oldboy” 2 stars Rated R 104 minutes Drama Starring: Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang Korean director/co-screenwriter Chan-wook Park’s haunting 2003 revenge drama “Oldboy” is one of the most unbearably intense films ever made. Based loosely on a Japanese graphic novel, the movie is the second installment in Park’s “Vengeance
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