Search for 2014

Nihilistic. Grim. Humorless. Misogynistic. Those are just a few words that could be used to describe Liam Neeson's new thriller, A Walk Among the Tombstones. The title provides more than a clue about the movie's tone and intentions. Yet this isn't...

For his directorial debut, Russell Crowe has attempted to tell a tale of war, tragedy, loss, romance, and healing. The results of his overreaching are evident early on and the final production is so jammed with subplots and secondary characters that ...

The best thing that can be said about Welcome to Me, as written by Eliot Laurence and directed by Shira Piven, is that it attempts to portray the real Borderline Personality Disorder as opposed to the Hollywood movie version of the disease. Unfortuna...

When the Game Stands Tall is one of those cliché-riddled feel good movies that, by trying too hard to be inspirational, ends up as cloying and overly sentimental. At first glance, the narrative trajectory might seem to be on a different vector fr...

While We're Young offers two movies for the price of one.  The first, about a married couple in their 40s coping with being rootless and middle-aged while lamenting the loss of their youth, is smartly-observed and relatable.  The second...

It's a noteworthy achievement for director Damien Chazelle to infuse a tale about the development of a musician with all the tension and intensity of a top-notch thriller. Whiplash is riveting. At times, it evidences the qualities of a can't-turn-a...

This is Reese Witherspoon's big Oscar push and the strength of her performance - easily the most forceful and memorable aspect of an otherwise unremarkable motion picture - may well earn her a nomination. Witherspoon certainly goes all-out, doing...

We live in a cynical world. A romantic fairy tale like Winter's Tale might have worked better in a kinder, gentler age but, in today's era of sarcasm and scorn, its flaws (of which there are many) are magnified. For something this sentimental to wo...

X-Men: Days of Future Past doesn't feel like a superhero movie, at least not in a traditional sense. There are action scenes but many are suffused with a sense of futility. Battles turn into massacres with the "good guys" on the wrong side of the c...