Author: Alabama Liberal

Not a good movie, but there’s a great performance at the center of it. What Works: This largely forgettable boxing movie will be known mostly for Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance, which is a 180 from last year’s excellent (and underseen) “Nightcrawler.” In that film, he was a rail-thin and articulate sociopath who hid his amoralism behind upbeat,…

Turns out a little bit of these guys goes a long way. What Works: Kids may like this film better than “Inside Out”… What Doesn’t: But you sure won’t. This is a movie made to entertain kids at home when parents don’t know what to do with them for 90 minutes. The actual Minions characters are cute…

Pixar’s latest has earned rave reviews, and it’s easy to see why. Not much more can be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said, but I’ll try anyway… What Works: Special kudos to the writer who came up with the idea to set a movie mostly inside the mind of a kid growing up,…

Something about this movie was a little off for me. The reviews are ecstatic, and it seemed to do extremely well at the specialty box office but I just can’t help thinking that most people might feel cheated out of 15 bucks if they’re paying to watch a movie that is basically a less successful…

[Fart noise] Sorry, but I’m just not drinking the Kool-Aid on this one. What Works: Chris Pratt does what he can. And raptors are always a welcome sight. Plus, even though a new genetically engineered dinosaur is the main attraction, I really preferred a giant aquatic dinosaur that is even more lethal than Black Fish. What…

The same weekend Melissa McCarthy was winning rave reviews and box office dough playing a feminist James Bond, “Entourage” was flopping at the box office and getting critically savaged for a perceived misogynistic slant. I can’t say I really view the film as anti-women, and it’s hard to imagine anyone being truly offended by such…

Better late than never, Alabama Liberal… What Works: This is my favorite of Melissa McCarthy’s star vehicles, and is the first of her pairings with director Paul Feig that feels like more than a series of loosely improvised “scenes.” Although McCarthy has been on box-office-fire from her breakthrough forward, her genre riffs have had mixed results…

A good movie? No, but it is the perfect movie to watch at home on a Sunday when you’ve got nothing much going on. It’s cozy, unchallenging, a little boring, a missed opportunity to explore the ambitions of older people, but also effortlessly appealing, and that’s mostly thanks to Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton as…

I feel sorry for this movie. Cameron Crowe tries to step outside his comfort zone and do something different not just for him but for studio films in general, then release it in the early summer period. And what happens? Do people hail it as the refreshing counter-programming charmer he was intending? It flops at…

This may sound tasteless but this is the rare film that finds a way to make Earthquakes boring. What Works: The Rock does what he can, and Carla Gugino isn’t half-bad as the female lead, and the few scenes with Paul Giamatti and Archie Panjabi are solid enough (even though he’s mostly reduced to the Richard…

A very small indie Western but after weeks of big budget, blockbuster bloat it may be the exact right time for a subtle but interesting period piece. What Works: Kodi Smit McPhee plays a Scottish nobleman trying to find his lost love Rose in tough, Wild West America. He receives “help” from Michael Fassbender’s ambiguous…

Terrible. It’s depressing that this is one of the worst films I’ve seen this year and it not only printed money and got great marks from audiences (you know a movie’s bad if it gets a solid “A” grade from Cinemascore) but also an 82 percent on rotten tomatoes. When even critics have given up,…

A sequel that I probably shouldn’t have liked, but did anyway. What Works: Why didn’t I hate this movie? It’s an unnecessary sequel in a summer that’s full of them, and it combines a lot of my least favorite elements like cover songs, sing-offs, and sloppy plotting, but there’s something inside this movie that’s hard not to like….