Every so often a movie will come along that captivates movie reviewers and the statements you read about it make you wonder if, perhaps, someone at my theater switched it out for some inferior test version. Looper is a perfect example of that. This time-travel film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe (everyone in the film […]
It’s been a long time since we’ve last encountered the team from the Men in Black series. For the record, I marginally enjoyed the first entry and thought the second one was just awful. Obviously that doesn’t exactly set me up as a huge fan for the third offering in the franchise. That’s how I […]
This past weekend I owed a friend a favor after having drug him to several independent films that he found a bit challenging to sit through. He’s very much a more mainstream type of movie guy. He wanted to see Marvel‘s The Avengers and given its stellar reviews I figured I didn’t have much choice but […]
Partners in the the narcotics department head back to high school to catch drug dealers in a big screen farce of 21 Jump Street. One way I can tell that a film isn’t all that interesting is when I take the time to see it, take notes about it and then entirely forget to post a […]
Liam Neeson‘s latest film is The Grey. Neeson has been one of my favorite actors over the years but frequent readers of my reviews will no doubt recall that I’ve had major problems with his latest films. The guy is a long way from Shindler’s List. It’s also been 8 years since 2004’s Kinsey, which is the last […]
For the first film to see in 2012 I decided to check out Chronicle. I hadn’t seen any previews and only became interested in it due to its quick success and large collection of positive reviews. Just before I got to the theater I read a couple things about it and realized this was going […]
As 2011 came to a close I found myself seriously behind on my yearly movie count (that is first-run movies I see each year at a theater). In a bid to get the number up to a respectable level I talked my friends into a movie marathon day on Sunday where we managed to stuff […]
The next film on my viewing list was The Adventures of Tintin. This is a film I really didn’t have much interest in as I knew nothing of the history of the character (it was a hugely popular European comic book during much of the 20th century). Much to my complete surprise the film grabbed hold […]
This weekend I managed to see two Steven Spielberg movies and that usually is a recipe for a great movie-going weekend. Sadly, that wasn’t the reality. First up was War Horse. This is a bit of a strange film in that the star of the film is the horse and in a way that’s unlike […]
There should be some sort of rule that movies with a cast like this have to be great. Sadly, there’s no such rule and no such luck. Tower Heist is a curious film with a few interesting moments, fewer laughs and a lot of misfires. Ben Stiller plays the lead and he’s terribly miscast here […]
Way back in China’s history judges were the investigators of the day and during the Tang Dynasty there lived a noteworthy magistrate by the name of Di Renji. In the 1940’s an international author wrote a series of mystery novels loosely based on the judge now re-christened Judge Dee. Today we have a new film based on […]
In what seems to amount to a rare situation this year I managed to catch two films this holiday weekend. I’ve had countless barriers this year to catching more films but the most striking one has been that I just haven’t felt very interested in much of what’s been put forth so far and with […]