Search for 2012

Most of us, even some who were part of the "in crowd," think of ourselves as having been outsiders during high school. It's the nature of adolescence. Movies like Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower capture the awkwardness, the lonel...

Any movie emerging from Aardman Animation Studios comes with a set of expectations, the majority of which are satisfied The Pirates! Band of Misfits, an affectionate parody of the pirate genre. Suffused with satire, wit, and the dry, tongue-in-chee...

Pitch Perfect looks, sounds, and feels like pretty much every other movie that features a singing or dancing competition. With all the effort invested in the musical numbers, the dramatic elements feel like warmed-over John Hughes. And it's not eve...

By turns powerful and frustrating, The Place Beyond the Pines is a three act tale about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons. It uses coincidence to emphasize consequence and ably applies karmic lifestyle interpretation to the text. ...

Playing for Keeps is a sloppy, poorly focused comedy that wants to be about the relationship between a father and his 9-year old son but ends up being about nearly everything else. The core problem is clear: the interaction between ex-soccer star G...

It comes as a bit of a surprise that, for consistently suspenseful chase sequences, the pick of the 2012 summer crop is the under-the-radar thriller from writer/director David Koepp, Premium Rush. The average chase, filmed with the traditional sele...

The moral of this story is: No matter how trustworthy he may be, never leave a teenager home alone while you go away for the weekend. Project X purports to offer a new twist on a very old tale: the out-of-control house party. Variations of this ...

In 1979, science fiction was thriving, but the movie community, becoming gorged on lightweight space opera fare like Star Wars, was unprepared for what Ridley Scott delivered with Alien, which was as much horror as it was sci-fi. Since the iconic x...

It's easy enough to label Promised Land as the "anti-fracking movie" because, ultimately, that's what it becomes. Before the overtly political, sloppy ending, however, there are some interesting dynamics at play here about how corporations operate ...

Quartet is as safe, conventional, and uncontroversial a film as one could imagine. The straightforward screenplay is elevated considerably by a series of sterling performances. If one wanted to bolster an argument about the importance of acting t...