Category: Monday Morning Movie Reviewer

24 reviews in 24 hours, let’s start things off with Big Eyes… What Works: This is a film based on a media frenzy that was a little bit before my time, but it details the outrageous true story behind those paintings of large-eyed children. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz may be the year’s most unlikely…

A nickname I’m giving Angelina Jolie’s new torture-palooza “Unbroken” is The Passion of the Soldier because it is mostly about watching a young soldier get the snot knocked out of him and/or struggling to survive in various ways. Now we know from the outset that the real-life guy this story is based on (Louie Zamperini)…

I’d say roughly half my list of the year’s 20 best films will be made up of documentaries by the time the year is through—somewhat because this year’s studio crop hasn’t been strong, but mostly because documentaries like Rachel Boynton’s “Big Men” are making a case for what documentaries can do better than scripted films:…

Particle Fever…It’s a documentary about the legendary physicists at CERN as they get ready to test the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, an experiment that hopes to recreate the conditions of The Big Bang or at least unravel some of the mysteries at the center of the universe’s creation. Now all that sounds dry…

Whew…it must be tough getting to a point where the once-hot offers are no longer coming in and you’ve got to star in whatever comes along. Well that’s the case for Frontera star Ed Harris, and especially Drive Hard star John Cusack, whose project doesn’t even have a false sense of substance… Frontera…Although it looks more…

…Just kidding. If anything these movies have only grown increasingly off-the-assembly-line since whatever promise the first one had. This one is set in London, but does it really matter? One of the problems with these movies is that it doesn’t matter if they’re set in NYC (the first one) or D.C. (the second one) or…

An earnest but dull film that tries to have it both ways with religion (appealing to both the faithful and secular) but will probably leave no one truly happy, and I’ll admit I dozed off for about ten minutes. Honestly, I think Darren Aronofsky’s unfairly maligned “Noah” was a much more interesting movie. What Works:…

Two light dramedies where young protagonists come of age, but only one is worth watching… Very Good Girls…Whew, this is not a good movie, but it wants to be. It wants to be an earnest exploration of sexuality coming into conflict with friendship as two “very good girls” (Dakota Fanning and Elisabeth Olsen) fall for…

Is this the final, for-real ending of the ongoing cash cow that the collected works of J.R.R. Tolkien has been for whatever’s left of New Line Cinema and whatever’s left of director Peter Jackson? [I have a theory that the real Peter Jackson actually died five years ago, and they just found a Santa personator…

I went to Chris Rock’s “Top Five” ready to see a great movie. It’s gotten incredible reviews, and most critics said it was Rock’s breakout, the film that finally translated his terrific standup persona to the big screen. I was more than ready for that film, but this isn’t really it. Despite a handful of…

Two very under-the-radar historical dramas (both centering around ideological and ethnic clashes) that I probably would have never watched if they weren’t both on Netflix…The question is: should you? Xingu…A film about the Villas-Boas brothers who encountered Xingu Indians in central Brazil during 1943 and then worked to protect them from “development” by outside government and business…

The destruction of our oceans is my pick for the most important issue facing the world, and especially as the top issue that nobody is dealing with at all. “Due to overfishing and rising ocean acidity, there won’t be fish to eat in 30 years” met with a shoulder shrug. “Fifty percent of the planet lives…

Two downbeat family dramas that aren’t exactly must-watches… Child’s Pose…An easier film to admire than like, it’s about a grown son who kills a child in a vehicle accident and his protective mother who’s desperate to keep him out of jail. It’s a series of long, dialogue heavy scenes with very minimal action, but a…