This movie stars George Clooney as a Hawaiian father of two whose wife is left permaneantly comatose from a boating accident, and only after that accident does he learn that she was cheating on him. It is also a sure thing best picture nominee and will be on almost every critic’s top ten list. Problem is…I’m…
Category: Monday Morning Movie Reviewer
Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes, Game of Shadows
The good news: this movie is exactly what you think it would be…that’s also the bad news. What Works: This is clearly a sequel that wants to leave the first one’s audience happy so once again Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are back as the ambiguously gay duo, Holmes doesn’t want Watson to get…
Movie Review: Cedar Rapids
Later today will bring reviews of some more current movies (Sherlock Holmes 2 and The Descendants) but first comes this smaller hit that opened earlier in the year but somehow I never got around to seeing it. In it, Ed Helms plays a mild-mannered, (very) small town insurance salesman who goes to the “big” city of Cedar…
Monday Morning Movie Review: Young Adult
And so concludes our quartet of films in limited release, but unlike Melancholia, A Dangerous Method, or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I would strongly recommend this movie with no hesitations. This is a lock for my “Ten Best of the Year List.” Young Adult stars Charlize Theron as a young adult book author (or ghost…
Movie Reviews: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Another movie playing in only a handful of theaters now but primed to expand soon. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is based on the excellent John Le Carre book (and also the BBC miniseries based on the book) of the same name about a retired master spy named George Smiley getting asked to ferret out a…
Movie Reviews: A Dangerous Method
Another movie playing in very limited release. This one based on the true story of the father of psycho-therapy, Sigmund Freud, his protege turned rival Carl Jung, and the Russian patient of Jung’s that came in between them when Jung began an affair with her. What Works: The movie nails the disappoints and resentments that…
Movie Reviews: Melancholia
This review kicks off a day of true quality, as I’ll be reviewing four independent movies (this, A Dangerous Method, Young Adult, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) only in limited release. So for once I’ll be ahead of the curve in seeing movies before most of America does…but, then again, I doubt most of America…
Monday Morning Movie Reviews: Take Shelter
Unlike all of the other movies I’m reviewing today, this one is still in (very few) theaters. It will be a couple months before anyone can rent it but I would really recommend that. I think this is the kind-of movie that plays best at home for four or five bucks instead of in a…
Movie Reviews: Bellflower
Another one for the scrap heap. And by that I mean that Bellflower technically came out months ago (I believe it first went into very limited release in early August) but I only now caught up with it On Demand. Bellflower is a bit different than The Dilemma or Super or Last Night in that…
Movie Reviews: The Dilemma
A straight turd from January of this year that I never actually saw until it showed up on HBO last week. So I killed two hours and held my nose to watch it. What Works: Some of Vince Vaughn’s fantasy sequences as he’s lying really work. They snap the movie out of its formulaic rhythms…
Movie Review: Super
Like Last Night, this was an independent movie released much earlier in the year but I just never got around to reviewing it until now. Back in the very first weeks of the site’s history, I felt like it was a waste of time to do more than two movie reviews a week as no…
Movie Review: Last Night
Today I’m getting some movies out of the way that I might have watched a long time ago. For whatever reason, I either thought the movies needed more time to marinate or I thought holding them for a bit would be better. In all cases, neither of those things turned out to be true. First,…
Monday Morning Movie Review: Hugo
Like all the best kid’s films, Hugo isn’t really for kids. To say it’s the best movie ever made about an orphan and a forgotten director in a Parisian train station is probably an understatement. Of all the movies I’m reviewing today, this is without a doubt the one I would recommend, and yet Hugo…