Movie Reviews News

11:25 AM
19-November
2009 The Blind Side ( ** )The Blind Side has blind spots. That's why, despite the best of intentions and a few audience-pleasing grace notes, this pigskin parable gets nowhere near the end zone. Based on the best-selling 2006 nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, The Blind Side is an inspirational drama about real-life professional football player Michael Oher, currently plying his trade for the Baltimore Ravens. Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw play Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, an affluent couple who take in Oher, played by Qunton Aaron, a burly, homeless African-American teenager from the crime-ridden projects of Memphis.
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10:50 AM
19-November
2009 The Twilight Saga: New Moon ( **1/2 )Twilight cast quite a spell a year ago. The runaway-hit romantic vampire drama adapted from Stephenie Meyer's Young Adult book offered the vampire/mortal tug-of-war as an apt metaphor for adolescent sexual anxiety. The ponderous New Moon, which features lots of mooning but is in no way new, emerges from the second book in Meyer's four-book series. While the first installment of the Twilight saga introduced itself to the world -- and thus had an element of freshness to it -- the second, not quite as well made but never less than respectable, is aimed squarely at the fans and is more of a gateway to the next installment than a stand-alone episode with closure. At its center is a wish-fulfillment romantic triangle involving three characters from Twilight -- Bella, Edward and Jacob.
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11:04 PM
17-November
2009 Planet 51 ( **1/2 )A rejoinder to all those science fiction creature features of the fifties, Planet 51 is an animated alien adventure comedy that flip-flops the residents and the interlopers. There's an alien from outer space who lands in the midst of ordinary folk, all right, but the alien is a human and the petrified people are the inhabitants of another planet. A dashing American astronaut, Captain Chuck Baker, voiced by Dwayne Johnson, lands on the titular planet, assuming he's the first life form to set foot there. How wrong he is.
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12:52 PM
12-November
2009 2012 ( ** )Boy, does director Roland Emmerich like to destroy things. In Independence Day, it was the White House. In Godzilla, it was New York City. In The Day After Tomorrow, it was everything everywhere. In this one, it's the Washington Monument and the Vatican in yet another end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it entertainment from the master of disaster. This time we're treated to our species' struggle to survive during a global catastrophe predicted centuries ago by the Mayans, who listed three-years-from-now as the end-of-days date on their calendar. "Sit down and buckle up," says a character. He's talking to us.
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11:23 AM
12-November
2009 Pirate Radio ( *1/2 )Fact-based this period ensemble comedy may be. But it's so overloaded and underachieving, it ends up shipwrecked. In 1966, Radio Rock is an off-shore radio station on a ship anchored in international waters broadcasting around the clock from the North Sea, just beyond British jurisdiction, and providing a steady stream of pop music and rock-and-roll relief to the millions of listeners who don't respond enthusiastically to the conservative programming of the BBC. The ship serves not only as a radio studio, but as sleeping quarters for the staff, led by owner Bill Nighy and American deejay Philip Seymour Hoffman. But a government minister played by Kenneth Branagh is obsessed with shutting them down.
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1:11 PM
11-November
2009 Precious ( ***1/2 )Set in Harlem in 1987, it's based on the novel, "Push." Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire is the film's full title. And Push has come to shove because this movie shoves. Hard. So impactfully intense is Precious that it stays with you long after the final credits roll even if you try to leave it behind: it's moving and memorable and marvelous. Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is an African-American 16-year-old so beleaguered -- to put it mildly -- she makes Job seem lucky. Throughout her lifetime, she's been abused, humiliated, ignored, and silenced, and she's both illiterate and obese. She's also pregnant for a second time by her father, a drug-addicted rapist who comes and goes, and resented by her monstrous, malevolent mother Mary (Mo'Nique). The film chronicles her journey to gain self-respect.
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3:49 PM
5-November
2009 The Fourth Kind ( **1/2 )Believers of this tingly horror thriller will find it upsetting, while detractors will dismiss it as half-baked (or just plain faked) Alaska. As Steven Spielberg reminded us in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the first kind of alien encounter is a sighting, the second is evidence, and the third is contact. Now we add another card to the deck: the fourth kind, which involves alien abduction. The Fourth Kind is a horror thriller about alien abduction, all right, but there's nothing kind about it. It's based on "actual case studies," as they say. Hmmm. Maybe.
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3:47 PM
5-November
2009 A Christmas Carol ( *** )This version of A Christmas Carol might scare the dickens out of the wee ones. But, visually at least, it wows the rest of us. The motion-capture process showcased by director Robert Zemeckis in 2004's Polar Express and again in 2007's impressive Beowulf is once again on display. But the technology that combines live performance and animation has been improved to the point that what many complained about as the "dead eye effect" among the human characters is no longer a problem in the director's third foray into the brave new world of performance capture. This latest version of Charles Dickens' yuletide classic is an animated retelling of the tale that's relatively faithful to the source material.
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10:32 AM
4-November
2009 The Men Who Stare at Goats ( *** )"More of this is true than you would believe." That's the legend that kicks off this quirky comedy, which was, I kid you not, inspired by actual events. But the many who stare at this quirky, herky-jerky non-turkey soon realize that, truth shmooth, dramatic license has been rather freely indulged. Not, as they say, that there's anything wrong with that. Loosely -- oh, so loosely -- based on Welsh author Jon Ronson's 2005 nonfiction best-seller, TMWSAG is a surrealist exploration of eccentricities in the U.S. government's defense budget spending. In its most inspired moments -- which are not constant but are at least frequent -- this fanciful, farcical film, replete with sight gags and zippy one-liners, recalls such great military satires as Dr. Strangelove and Catch 22. But while it lacks their cohesiveness and impact, it nonetheless remains thoroughly unpredictable and zanily entertaining.
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8:29 AM
29-October
2009 The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day ( *1/2 )The sequel to the theatrical flop and DVD cult hit, The Boondock Saints, brings back the Irish brothers played by Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery. This time the vigilante/assassin siblings return from Ireland to seek vengeance for the death of a priest. They've been living quietly on their father's (Billy Connolly) sheep farm in Ireland, out of reach and out of touch, for the last eight years. But when they find out that a Boston priest whom they both greatly admire has been murdered in their trademark manner so that they are implicated as the killers, they decide to bring their kind of justice to those responsible and clear their name in the bargain.
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