Author: Alabama Liberal

I’m stunned that this film has a horrendous 29% on rotten tomatoes. [But maybe not so stunned it’s a box office flop.] It’s just a reminder that every so often, the majority of critics get it wrong, and actually pander to broad-audience films a lot more than they should (that October’s other Jennifer Garner movie Alexander and…

This Reese Witherspoon-starrer (that doesn’t really star Reese) has just about left theaters, but I think this is more the kind of movie you watch at home anyway. That way there’s no judgment when you happen to cry during some of the more obvious tear-jerker moments. The first third of this movie is about several Sudanese…

A vibrant, offbeat animated tale that never quite becomes this decade’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” but is still well-worth watching. What Works: This has not been the best year for animated movies, and it feels like a lot of the major players have pretty much written off 2014. [Pixar didn’t even release anything this year, after…

Every now and again, a great film falls through the cracks. Kill the Messenger is one of the year’s very best but is not quite getting the critical or commercial respect it deserves, and I doubt most people have even heard it. What Works: The movie is the true story of Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner,…

This is a tough one because on the one hand, I should be thrilled to watch a movie clearly made for adults (there’s been a grand total of 9 of them this year) and there’s not a zombie or superhero in sight, but the movie also isn’t very good. Do you give Robert Downey Jr. points for…

I wasn’t too surprised when this movie turned out to be bad, and no one else should be either… What Works: Ummm…well…uhhh…[crickets chirping]…Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance is always worth watching and he’s more menacing than ever as a very old vampire… What Doesn’t Work: So many things. For one, they tease out that Dance’s…

“Gone Girl” is a hard film to review because it’s based on a book I would consider to be a masterpiece of “genre” fiction (technically a mystery/thriller but really more a deep psychological profile of a psychopath and a marriage folded into a thriller framework), and unlike 99.99 percent of books, it was a monster…

A children’s film that is both visually unique and nasty. I enjoyed it as an art experiment, but will kids really enjoy a film where the human characters are more disgusting than the trolls? Maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word… What Works: The movie contains a nice message about not listening to fear mongers or…

Two films (both based on something, either an old TV show or a book) opened recently that were very similar in plot structure—a once-great actor now known mostly for action roles (Denzel Washington, Liam Neeson) plays a retired hard-ass who gets mixed up in a shadowy crime web and tries to dismantle some sinister criminals…