Search for 2013

Watching The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola's exploration of today's "celebrity culture," is an uncomfortable - bordering on unpleasant - experience. The problem isn't the depiction of the underside of America's celebrity obsession but the manner in whi...

It's difficult to overstate what director Abdellatif Kechiche has achieved with Blue is the Warmest Color, his powerful (if controversial) look into the life of a young girl as she experiences the highs and lows of first love. This may seem like a ...

It's all about Cate. Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's latest, is a loose reworking of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. It's narratively uneven but the occasional lapses of focus are rescued by Cate Blanchett's riveting lead performance. Th...

I don't know whether Markus Zusak's young adult bestelling novel The Book Thief should be considered "unfilmable" but the adaptation, written by Michael Petroni and directed by Brian Percival, makes a compelling case that it shouldn't have been fil...

Broken City? More appropriately, Broken Movie. There's an old multiplex proverb that goes something like this: "Beware ye movies opening in January that star A-list actors." Broken City illustrates the wisdom of those words. This mess of a moti...

Bullet to the Head is a throwback to the '80s. Starring 66-year old Sylvester Stallone, who embraced his action-hero reputation during that decade and directed by Walter Hill, whose biggest hits came between 1982 and 1988, this movie offers the kin...

Calling Forrest Gump… Calling Forrest Gump… With The Butler, director Lee Daniels has managed to "Gump" the Civil Rights movement. That's not necessarily a bad thing but there are times when so many famous cameos threaten to become a distra...

Note: This review contains spoilers. It isn't possible to discuss the full breadth of The Call's stupidity without providing some specifics. Labeling The Call as "relentlessly dumb" would be an overestimation of its intelligence. This is as br...

The Canyons opens with still photographs of crumbling, disused movie theaters - multiplexes that, as recently as a decade ago, might have been bustling sites of human congress on weekends and holidays. These images have little to do with the story ...

Movies like Captain Phillips - taut, white-knuckle thrillers that feature ordinary guys instead of bona fide action heroes - are something of an endangered species. In today's risk-averse movie industry, making an "action" film without an establish...