Maria Malin/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Third Person (2014)
Paul Haggis has again formulated an interwoven story with “Third Person,” this time finally resolving the contrivance inherent in the narrative device by having all interconnected vignettes conveniently taking place in one writer’s fertile imagination.
MOVIE REVIEW
Homefront (2013)
Justin Lubin/Open Road Films
In many ways a movie is all about timing. What seems like a good hook when a script begins doing the rounds can lose its freshness by the time it makes the screen. And of course the trouble is television has gotten so good lately, it can be almost impossible for movies to keep completely separate identities. But “Homefront” is particularly unlucky, since it comes across as a mash-up of the two most distinctive settings of recent long-form television: “Breaking Bad” set in the world of “True Blood.”
MOVIE REVIEW
This Is the End (2013)
Suzanne Hanover/
Columbia Pictures
When two Jewish filmmakers decide to make a comedy based on the biblical Judgment Day, questions about their motives naturally arise. After all, this isn’t nearly as benign as Barbra Streisand recording a couple of Christmas albums. While comedy in any form has often been a taboo-slinging free-for-all, what Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are attempting with “This Is the End” could easily be perceived as sacrilegious. On the flip side, they could be accused of heresy if they were outright singing the Christian gospel.
MOVIE REVIEW
Your Highness (2011)
Frank Connor/Universal Studios
It’s hard to fathom precisely how the makers of “Your Highness” may have pitched the film to the studio executives: Think “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” with excessive vulgarity and gore? Picture a live-action “Shrek” sans the lovable green ogre? Envision newly minted Oscar Swan queen-Mother Leia transforming herself into Fiona the Warrior Princess? Consider an Oscar co-host-daytime soap star-Yale professor dabbling in a film that revolves around a severed penis instead of a severed arm? And how about it all in a vehicle starring the next Seth Rogen–Zach Galifianakis?
Who in his or her right mind would green-light a movie with such a premise?
MOVIE REVIEW
127 Hours (2010)
Chuck Zlotnick/Fox Searchlight Pictures
With “Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle finally broke his streak of hyperkinetic movies that ultimately left the audiences cold. But following his Oscar triumph, that nagging problem threatens to rear its ugly head once more in the big-screen adaptation of rock-climber Aron Ralston’s memoir “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” Starring James Franco, “127 Hours” retells Mr. Ralston’s harrowing ordeal of having his right arm pinned between a fallen boulder and a canyon wall at the Blue John Canyon in Utah, an experience that would end in self-amputation.
MOVIE REVIEW
Date Night (2010)
Myles Aronowitz/20th Century Fox
“Date Night” achieves the impressive feat of squandering Steve Carell and Tina Fey behind the wheezy action-comedy aesthetic of director Shawn Levy. In films ranging from “Cheaper by the Dozen” to “Night at the Museum,” the now-veteran helmer has demonstrated a far firmer grasp of hoary broad clichés than the nuances of human behavior studied on “The Office” and “30 Rock.” Though well cast and sprinkled with the occasional dose of realistic emotion in its portrait of a marriage gone stale, “Date Night” mostly just spins its wheels through frenetically rendered, meaningless plot developments disguised as a narrative.
MOVIE REVIEW
Howl (2010)
2010 Sundance Film Festival
The Beat Generation should be fertile ground for cinematic harvest, but David Cronenberg's treatment of William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" remains the only worthy adaptation that comes to mind. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, documentarians behind "The Times of Harvey Milk" and "The Celluloid Closet," now try their hands at fashioning Allen Ginsberg's monumental poem "Howl" for the screen. The two had originally conceived the project as a documentary to commemorate the poem's 50th anniversary, but the dearth of available archival footage forced them to take the fiction approach.
MOVIE REVIEW
Milk (2008)
Phil Bray/Focus Features
The story of Harvey Milk has never seemed timelier than it does right now, with this month’s defeat of Proposition 8 in California and the ongoing war over equal rights for the American gay population. That particular bit of happenstance amplifies the considerable dramatic impact of Gus Van Sant’s “Milk,” which chronicles the activist period in its subject’s life. Brilliantly acted and laced with verisimilitude, the movie convincingly delves into the front lines of that war in its earliest stages.
Sorry. No data so far.