Frozen Review
RATING: (3.5 STARS) What’s this? An animated musical with genuinely great music? It’s true. There’s a lot that’s great about Disney’s Frozen—its breathtaking animation, its plucky characters, its old-fashioned sensibility—but what I’m most heartened by is the notion that movies like this can feature some fantastic tunes. As much as Disney’s been on a roll […]
John Carter Review
RATING: (2.5 STARS) It’s hard to believe a film so skillfully crafted and brimming with so many ideas could elicit such a blah reaction. But this is John Carter. Director Andrew Stanton‘s live-action debut is a hodgepodge of epic battles, clunky dialogue, interesting mythology, and trite romance. Much has been made of the film’s massive […]
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Review
RATING: (4 STARS) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a superior thriller that accomplishes the unfathomable in condensing John le Carré’s masterful British espionage novel into an appropriately dense but followable two-hour film. And shockingly, not a ton of important detail is lost in the translation. Director Tomas Alfredson (following up the sensational Let the Right […]
Munich Review
RATING: (4 STARS) The buzz around the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Munich back in 2005 was deafening. After a shift into more commercial projects (A.I., Catch Me if You Can, Minority Report, The Terminal, War of the Worlds), the director finally transitioned back to the kind of film that won him an Oscar. But many […]
There Will Be Blood Review
RATING: (4 STARS) The first time I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,†I thought film was kind of a mess. A sprawling, epic, random mess, but a thought-provoking, impeccably made, sensationally acted mess. The direction, music, and cinematography are all over the place, as is the main character who’s a bundle of […]
