Movie Reviews News

11:18 AM
4-February
2010 From Paris with Love ( * )Consider this review of From Paris with Love a package delivered. With hate. The oddly titled thriller is a slightly comedic crime flick, a bullet-riddled, mindless actioner that at first seems specifically titled to suggest the James Bond catalog (From Russia with Love), and thereafter designed to recall Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson driving around talking about ordering fast food in the City of Light. And sure enough, all of a sudden, out comes a "Royale with Cheese." The very same Travolta stars as Charlie Wax, a wiseacre loose cannon of a CIA agent, who's teamed with staright-laced aide Jonathan Rhys Meyers on a terrorist-thwarting mission that we never quite get a full explanation of.
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10:55 AM
4-February
2010 Dear John ( ** )Sentimentality can wash over the other elements in a romantic drama until there's little else there. That's pretty much what happens, almost to the letter, in Dear John, which peels the expected onions, but lacks the other ingredients for a satisfying "good cry" movie experience. Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried play a soldier and a college student who meet on a picturesque South Carolina beach and instantly fall for each other. But events intrude on their plans for the future.
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8:15 AM
2-February
2010 The Last Station ( *** )"Happy families are all alike," wrote Leo Tolstoy, but "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Including his, according to this historical drama, set in 1910, which takes us inside Tolstoy's domicile during the final days in the life of celebrated, world-famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy, played by Christopher Plummer, and the knock-down-drag-out domestic war that raged between him and his wife, Sofya, his muse and wife of 48 years, played by the spectacular Helen Mirren. He's thinking of willing his fortune to the Russian people instead of his family and this enrages her.
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5:27 PM
28-January
2010 When in Rome ( *1/2 )This ham-handed hooey is an antic, frantic, romantic comedy that makes the mind roam ... to thoughts of better movies. Kristen Bell stars as a New York workaholic and art curator (as if we buy that for one second) who's especially disillusioned with romance. At her sisters' wedding in Rome, she makes the mistake of removing five coins from the magic fountain of love. And as the myth says, all the guys who threw the coins in fall for her. But is that the only reason best man Josh Duhamel likes her?
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10:22 AM
28-January
2010 Edge of Darkness ( *** )Edge of Darkness brings Mel Gibson back into the light. And he sure looks like someone who belongs there. Although he has stayed in the public eye with his infamous off-screen exploits, and made quite a mark as a director, he's fallen from the fraternity of bankable A-listers by not starring in a movie in eight years. This is the kind of suspenseful revenge thriller, brutal but not insensitive, that features Gibson in nearly every scene and means to demonstrate that he is still a lethal weapon. He certainly is: we're immediately reminded of just how much screen presence and authority he still has.
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10:24 AM
26-January
2010 Legion ( *1/2 )Giving a whole new spin to being "on the side of the angels," Legion is a supernatural action-horror thriller, an uneasy amalgam of apocalyptic meditation and horror nightmare, with too much graphic violence for folks who show up for the religious thrust and too much religion for action devotees. Hey, don't look now, but suddenly the apocalypse-now genre is a bull market (2012, The Road, The Book of Eli). The fate of humanity hangs in the balance in Legion, with a small group of humans who will soon have to fight to avoid extermination of their species. Yep, God has lost faith in humankind and has wrathfully unleashed a torrent of angels, demons, zombies, and plagues to do away with the human species.
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12:02 PM
21-January
2010 Tooth Fairy ( ** )Believing in the tooth fairy just got tougher. That's because the comedy-fantasy, Tooth Fairy, comes up cavity-prone. It's got whimsy, but it's mighty flimsy. Dwayne Johnson stars as a tough-as-nails minor-league hockey player who boasts his nickname as a result of his penchant for being the team's rinky-dink enforcer, removing the pearly whites of his on-ice opponents without any dental equipment other than his bulky bod. At one autograph-signing session, Derek honestly but cynically discourages a youngster's expressed hope of someday becoming a hockey player by telling him to abandon his dreams and, in the name of common sense, lower his expectations. Bad move. This guy's headed for Fairyland to do penance for his attitude.
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8:13 AM
21-January
2010 Extraordinary Measures ( **1/2 )Extraordinary Measures is an inspirational real-life drama about the efforts of John and Aileen Crowley to find a researcher with a cure for the rare disease that has afflicted two of their three children. Although their story is certainly extraordinary, as well as touching and uplifting, the film itself is effective in its very ordinariness: a warming January combination of confident storytelling and sound production values.
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11:30 AM
13-January
2010 The Book of Eli ( **1/2 )Denzel Washington takes to the road during a year well past 2012 as The Road and 2012 are joined in their genre by this latest end-of-the-world drama. A futuristic, post-apocalyptic neo-western, it's about a reluctant but fierce warrior who fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind. Denzel Washingtonstars as the solitary, larger-than-life, laconic title character, who wanders -- on foot: he's a walker extraordinaire -- westward across the civilization-free wasteland thirty years after a nuclear holocaust on desolate roads patrolled by brutal, murderous gangs.
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9:13 PM
12-January
2010 The Lovely Bones ( *** )Peter Jackson's filmization of the popular 2002 Alice Sebold novel retains the striking central conceit: the narrator is a 14-year-old girl who's been murdered and is telling her story from beyond the grave. She's in "the in-between" that bridges life on earth and death in heaven. Susie Salmon, played by Atonement's remarkable Saoirse Ronan, is a teenager from suburban Pennsylvania who is brutally murdered on her way home from school in 1973 by a serial-killer neighbor. She finds herself in an ethereal location in the afterlife, where she gets to observe the devastating grief endured by her loved ones, and tries to come to grips with her own death even as they do.
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