Category: Monday Morning Movie Reviewer

Note: This is the last movie review of 2014, but not article. Come back in a few hours for lists of the Worst TV Characters of the Year and Best TV Characters of the Year. And come back New Year’s Day for a run-down of the 200-plus movies I’ve seen this year, everything from the bottom of…

I’m not really a Reese Witherspoon fan, but if she keeps making movies like “Wild,” I might become one. For me, this is her best performance since 1999’s “Election,” and it’s the first film since then where I felt like she’s not holding back or guarding something about herself. Only time will tell if this…

And just because the faithful Alabama Liberal readers (all 5 of them) have been very loyal in something of an off-year, I’ll throw in a bonus 25th hour review… You either enjoyed the first “The Trip” movie or you didn’t, and that’ll probably be a decent indication of whether you’ll go for this film’s low-key…

There’s a cold war going on and the competition mostly revolves around the West and China trying to outdo each other with more and more advanced robots. Then, naturally, they come up with a sexy cyborg—it’s just coincidental that she’s hot—that achieves artificial intelligence. It’s all hum-drum stuff you’ve seen before that comes across as…

…Damn, all these reviews in a row is starting to really up my tolerance for puns. Anyway, the remake of The Gambler is one of those movies that should work but just never really comes together. It’s got a great cast, a hand-picked soundtrack of forgotten soul classics, crisp direction, and a script that allows for occasionally…

Spending two hours with this film would be too long. [A three-point pun shot.] There’s really not much to it other than America’s Next Top Model’s most successful contestant e-v-e-r (Annaleigh Tipton) going over to Miles Teller’s apartment for what’s supposed to be a one night stand, but getting snowed in for two nights because…

Whew…this is a tough sit. It’s an exploration of Canada’s shameful practices towards its own Native American population (see kids! between this and “Marmato,” Canada isn’t as nice as you thought), but despite its good intentions it’s really just one ugly scene after another of brutal, nasty beat downs. There’s a difference between violence and…

A documentary about struggling Colombian gold miners trying to battle a huge Canadian conglomerate. [See kids, it’s not just American corporations that crush the third world…well, usually it is, but Europe, China, and sometimes even Canada get in the mix too.] The film is noble and sporadically interesting, but also a little aimless. Watch it,…

A baaaad indie “rom-com” centered around a sci-fi premise: two people who live in two different locations that have never met each other have a psychic connection that lets them see brief flashes of life through (you guessed it) each other’s eyes. Bark-bark, this thing is a dog. Grade: D+

A disappointing musical that I’d probably wait to watch for free down the road…if you watch it at all. Time is a cost after all… What Works: Emily Blunt and James Corden are great as the baker and his wife. I also liked Johnny Depp’s five minutes of screen time since he looks like he’s having the…

A weirdly stilted love story about a future where people are assigned into classes based on “frequencies” with high frequencies being generally better at life but worse with empathy, and low frequencies having rotten luck. The film delves so deep into talk about sci-fi frequencies that I began to feel I was watching a statistics…

An exciting and inventive kung fu film about Buddhist demon hunters. Even people who hate subtitled films will like this one. It’s fun from beginning to end with one caveat: it comes off as a little too repressed that the badass female heroine keeps getting rejected so thoroughly by her doofus male counterpart. It plays into the…

2014 has been a big year for nefarious “double” movies what with Jesse Eisenberg battling himself in “The Double” and the superior indie-head-games of “The One I Love.” But both of those films had a comedic tone that is completely lacking in the moody existential thriller “Enemy,” where a very-serious professor (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) encounters a…