Search for 2013

Don Jon is about addiction, obsession, and compulsion. It's about how the elements that drive and define our lives can impede normal, productive behavior. And, unlike a dark film like Shame, which deals with the same subject, it attacks its thesis ...

Elysium is a thoroughly entertaining science fiction/action spectacle that reinforces the argument that director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) has what it takes to enthrall audiences. However, I can't help but wishing this material had been given "th...

Ender's Game, long a staple of science fiction readers, has had a strange, winding trip to the silver screen. For many years, Orson Scott Card refused to sell the rights to the book, wanting to maintain control over the final product. This iteratio...

Enough Said is a maddeningly uneven dramatic comedy from writer/director Nicole Holofcener, whose previous efforts have shared the tone and a few of the themes with this one. The film's dramatic underpinning and the way it addresses impending empty...

Generic and forgettable - those are the two words that immediately come to mind to describe Chris Wedge's first solo outing as an animated feature film director. (With Carlos Saldanha, he created Ice Age). What makes matters worse is that Epic isn'...

Escape Plan can best be viewed through glasses with nostalgia-tinted lenses. It's a Valentine to the '80s starring two of the decade's larger-than-life action stars in a plot that would have been at home during the Reagan years. Some thirty years l...

It's tempting to look at the 2013 reincarnation of Evil Dead as yet another pointless remake of an '80s horror film. Haven't there been enough of these? One glance at the credit list reveals that both director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell (o...

Everyone knows John Turturro as an actor. After starting out his career during the early 1980s, he became a regular in movies made by Spike Lee and The Coen Brothers. He has worked for Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Robert Redford. And, when he ...

On the surface, The Family appears to tell a familiar story: a mob enforcer turned informer is placed into the witness protection program while his former associates seek to find and terminate him. What differentiates this from its antecedents is t...

"Mindless entertainment": that's a phrase that will be repeated often enough in association with Fast & Furious 6, which exists purely to showcase how idiotically over-the-top action sequences can become when annoyances like gravity are tossed to t...